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Library of The Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON + NEW JERSEY 
C5 D 


PRESENTED BY 


John Stuart Conning, D.D. 











iE RECONSTRUCTION 
Or THE SPIRFFUAL IDEAL 


BOOKS BY FELIX ADLER 


The Reconstruction of the Spiritual 
Ideal 


An Ethical Philosophy of Life 
The World Crisis and Its Meaning 
Marriage and Divorce 

The Moral Instruction of Children 





WeaEY RECONSTRUCTION 
OPrae SPIRITWAL IDEAL 


HIBBERT LECTURES, DELIVERED IN MAN- 
Sito PER COLLEGE, OXFORD, MAY, 1923 


BY 


FELIX ADLER 





D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEWoOYORK 0: >) 1924. 122 LONDON 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, By 


D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


I. 
8b 
ITT. 
LV: 
V. 
VI. 


Dr PROFUNDIS 

THE SPIRITUAL IDEAL 
MARRIAGE 

SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 
Society oF MANKIND 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https ://archive.org/details/reconstructionof00adle 


THE RECONSTRUCTION 
OF THE SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


u 
DE PROFUNDIS 


UT of the depths into which it has fal- 

len humanity cries to-day for help. 

But as yet there is no response. There seems 
in fact to be moral retrogression all along 
the line. The appalling number of divorces 
in all civilized countries indicates the under- 
mining of the family. The tension between 
employers of labor and wage earners is be- 
coming more and more acute. Radical 
changes in the social order are contemplated. 
Profound changes of some sort seem inevi- 
table, and can hardly be carried through 
without conflict. The horror of the recent 
war is still felt in our bones, and yet it seems 
as if mankind could not take to heart the 


most drastic lessons, the most condign pun- 
I 


2 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


ishments. For alongside of the pacifistic cur- 
rent, preparations for new. wars to be con- 
ducted by still more terrible methods are 
proceeding apace. Above all, there is one 
fact that strikes every observer: the so-called 
moral forces seem to have failed in the great 
crisis through which the world is passing. 
Religion was powerless to stay the carnage. 
Indeed, many of its representatives fell in 
with the prevailing fury, and on their part 
added fuel to the flames. Allah is said to 
have laughed aloud in his Mohammedan 
heaven when the news came that Christian 
preachers on the one side were proclaiming 
a Jehad or holy war against their Christian 
brethren on the other side. Again, the pray- 
ers for peace that were prescribed and re- 
cited in many churches were spoken into the 
wind; they had no effect on the combatants. 

But already before these recent events 
moral ideals had fallen, at least among many 
of the intellectuals, into discredit. The fol- 
lowers of Marx openly sneered at what they 
called ideologies. Ethical ideals, in their 


DE PROFUNDIS 3 


opinion, are by-products or epiphenomena of 
the operation of economic factors. Eco- 
nomic considerations determine human his- 
tory. At the same time it may be remarked 
that economic considerations had as little in- 
fluence in preventing what happened as 
moral considerations. The economists 
looked on as foolishly as did the moralists. 
The most irrefutable predictions of loss to 
the victor equally with the vanquished failed 
to cool the hot frenzy. Something more 
than the calculations of self-interest 1s 
needed to check the blood-lust, to turn into 
safe channels the turbulent energies of hu- 
man multitudes. The economist has no case 
in court against the moralist—both have 
failed in the crisis. Humanity cried loudly 
enough out of its depths, but neither had an 
adequate answer. Even now in the war that 
is being conducted after the peace, the com- 
mon sense counsels of the best economists 
as well as of the moral idealists, are being 
swept aside with scant ceremony. But if we 


4 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


are to arrive at anything better than pessi- 
mism and discouragement, we had better 
make an end of complaints and turn our 
attention toward possibilities that promise 
results for the future. Immediately after the 
war the task of reconstructing human society 
was uppermost in people’s minds. Extrava- 
gant hopes, tinged with millennialistic illu- 
sions, were to the fore. These hopes were 
doomed to prompt disappointment. But the 
task remains, as necessary, as urgent, as ever. 

In this business of reconstruction, the 
economists, whatever their failures in the 
past, will have their part to play, and in re- 
gard to the proximate future perhaps the 
leading part. The statesmen also, if any ex- 
ist—we scan the horizon eagerly to discern 
them—will have their part to play. But 
those who cannot get away from their wor- 
ship of moral ideals will also have their part 
to play, and, looking to the far future, theirs 
will be the fundamental part. But they will 
have to go searchingly into the matter of 


DE PROFUNDIS 5 


the failure of the moral ideals in the crisis 
when humanity called out of the depths, and 
will have to ask themselves whether the 
ethical ideal failed because it was ethical, or 
perhaps because it was not ethical enough; 
whether it failed because it was ideal or be- 
cause it was not comprehensively and pro- 
foundly ideal enough; whether, in short, the 
time has not come to reconstruct the moral 
ideal with a view to giving it the power it 
lacks to grip men’s wills and more ade- 
quately control their behavior. 

I shall make an attempt in this book to 
sketch a reconstructed moral ideal, and test 
it by its applications to some of the most 
vital problems of modern life. But before 
taking up the subject, certain preliminary 
reflections may be in order. 

An ideal is a thing desired, not yet real- 
ized. There are subjective and objective 
ideals. The subjective are in their nature 
private, the objective are public. The sub- 
jective correspond to desires which may be 


6 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


mere whimsies; the objective correspond to 
certain deep needs felt by many.’ 

Every great ideal is intended to be a re- 
lief from some sort of spiritual pain. Ideals 
are pang-born; they are the offspring of suf- 
fering; they are raised up before the mind in 
order to allay anguish. This is especially 
true of the religious or cosmic ideals. The 
history of religions might be written in terms 
of the particular types of inner pain which 
respectively they were designed to alleviate. 

Goethe says somewhere: “When I suffer 
under the pressure of the finite I take refuge 
in the Infinite.’ Now the finite world 
presses upon men at different points, cor- 
responding to the temperament of the people 
to which they belong, and to their develop- 
ment. Thus the Hindus were especially 
afflicted by a sense of the unreality of things. 
To them the world seemed a vast phantas- 
magoria, the realm of Maya, or illusion; and 
to escape the pervading consciousness of 


1This does not exclude that an objective ideal may at first 
be conceived by an individual; but then it must be of such a 
character as to spread, to be shared. 


DE PROFUNDIS 7 


deception in things touched and seen, they 
formed for their relief the ideal of an abso- 
lute real, the one Brahma, a rock-bottom 
real, so to speak, a ground of things which 
would not dissipate into mist when handled 
—the mist of the veil of Maya. While the 
Buddhists in their turn, starting from the 
same conviction of the unreality of finite 
things, discovered, or thought that they had 
discovered, a remedy in the opposite direc- 
tion, the remedy being enlightenment as to 
the unreality of the soul itself which experi- 
ences the unreality of things. They cured 
the malady of the inner self by dissolving it 
in Nirvana. The two negatives combined 
as enlightenment constituted for them a sort 
of positive.’ 

The finite pressed upon the consciousness 
of the Hebrew in a different way, and at a 
different point. The Hindu was metaphysi- 
cal, the Hebrew was moral. The finite 
world for the Hebrew was preéminently 


2The above is given as my impression of Buddhism. I am 
not entitled to speak as a specialist. 


8 SPT RASCAL Peake 


the human world. The pain that cut 
into his soul was the inversion of moral 
values as witnessed in this human world, 
the strong dealing ruthlessly with the 
weak, the oppressor on top, the oppressed 
helpless under his heel. To the eye of the 
Hebrew prophet the fact of oppression was 
the one huge blot on the universe. The topsy- 
turveyness of the moral order was the one 
thing that excited those convulsive utter- 
ances that bear witness to the inner moral 
agony—the type of pain which the finite 
world as he saw it produced in him. He 
found relief by taking his flight toward the 
Infinite, by the ideal of a supremely right- 
eous and omnipotent God, who in due time 
would redress the moral balance within the 
human sphere, give the earth and the fulness 
thereof to the righteous, converting or de- 
stroying the wicked. 

In the Christian consciousness, which at 
first was like the Hebrew, predominantly 
ethical, the metaphysical, Hellenic elements 
only entering later on, and even then as 


DE PROFUNDIS 9 


ancillary rather than paramount, we en- 
counter a new development. The Hebrews 
always believed that the oppressor would 
some time find his match. The yoke which 
he rivetted on the necks of the oppressed 
would definitely be broken; the triumph of 
the good principle would be made manifest 
in the victory of good men, those who em- 
bodied the good principle, over the bad men, 
those who embodied the evil principle.* In 
the Christian consciousness of those early 
days, this blank dualism, this sharp distinc- 
tion between the righteous and the wicked, 
tended to be gradually modified. The ani- 
mus of religious feeling was not so much 
directed principally against the overtly 
wicked, like the publicans, those shameless 
exploiters, as against the stupidly self-right- 
eous, who insisted on the pointed distinction 
between themselves and the bad men. The 
new development consisted in emphasizing 


3 Somewhat in the same manner in which our naive con- 
temporaries conceived of the victory of the Allies (the Czar of 
Russia among the number) over the utterly bad Central 
Powers. 


IO SPIRITUAL AID EA 


the same strain of evil present in the op- 
pressed as in the oppressor, the same tend- 
ency to lust, anger and pride—in a word, 
the type of pain in which the Christian re- 
ligion took its rise was caused by the dis- 
covery of the radical evil with which human 
nature in general is afflicted.“ And there was 
a certain taking sides with the oppressor, a 
certain leaning toward him, a certain pity 
and sorrow for his moral condition, and the 
fine intuition that his experience might ren- 
der him peculiarly fit to realize the crying 
need of moral renovation. 

Those writers who in our day endeavor 
to represent Jesus as a kind of Socialist re- 
former seem quite to miss the purport of 
His teaching. The Socialist says, wealth for 
all; Jesus says, wealth for none. The differ- 
ence is immense; the Socialist aims to abol- 
ish poverty, Jesus pronounces his beatitude 
upon the poor. He does not sympathize the 
less with those who endure oppression, yet 


4Which in the teaching of Jesus did not exclude the pos- 
sibility of regeneration for all: “The Kingdom of Heaven 
is within you.” 


DE PROFUNDIS II 


he blesses them when they are persecuted, 
and suffer all manner of evil. The idea im- 
plied is that since the strain of wickedness 
is in all men, the persecuted, who suffer 
from its consequences, who feel in their own 
flesh, so to speak, how the evil principle 
hurts, shall use their experience to purge 
their own nature of similar strains. This ex- 
plains the doctrine of nonresistance, and 
much besides. 

It could not fail that pondering on this 
universal presence of badness to the neglect 
of the reassuring, confidence-giving affirma- 
tion, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within 
you,’ should lead, among the less spiritu- 
ally-minded followers of Jesus, to moral 
pessimism, to absolute hopelessness, to a 
sense of the utter depravity of human na- 
ture—and the relation of this to the appa- 
ratus of orthodox Christian doctrine is plain.° 


5 The Hebrew religion looked forward to the realization 
of the moral ideal in a righteous community or state. When 
the Jewish nationality was destroyed, the separate individuals 
were left to seek salvation each in his own heart. This led 
to excessive introspection, to the exaggerated importance 
ascribed to sex purity, and tended to corroborate and darken 
the pessimism referred to in the text. 


12 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


In any case, the fact that a certain peculiar 
kind of inner pain was the starting-point of 
the Christian religion, and that there is a 
definite relation between this kind of pain 
and the shape which the Christian ideal took 
on, that there was a certain spiritual need, 
a profound affliction which some felt more 
acutely than others, but which was shared 
by many, and which constituted the objec- 
tive basis of the ideal in its Christian form 
—this seems to me convincing. 

I urge that in order to reconstruct society 
we must reconstruct the moral ideal. This 
is my main thesis which will be developed 
in various ways in the succeeding chapters. 
But we must have an objective basis for our 
ideal; and this we shall get if we make ex- 
plicit to our minds the kind of spiritual pain 
by which we in the present age are chiefly 
afflicted. For often people are ill at ease, and 
yet are not clear as to what it is that troubles 
them, and cannot make their way through 
difficulties because they have not sufficiently 
grasped the terms of the problems to be 


DE PROFUNDIS 13 


solved. Now as I reflect upon my own ex- 
perience and upon the experience which 
others have communicated to me, it seems 
to me that the characteristic spiritual pain 
of our time is threefold. 

First, the sense of the insignificance of 
man in this wide universe. The Psalmist 
confessed it plaintively despite his piety; 
Seneca ‘states it) eloquently, rhetorically; 
the eighteenth-century Montesquieu puts it 
neatly. But never has the Lilliputian dis- 
parity between man and the magnitude of 
his world, the immensities of space, come 
home with such crushing force as it has to 
our own generation. A man six feet high is 
something of a giant in the eyes of his fel- 
lows. From the top of a moderately high 
hill he is no more conspicuous than a creep- 
ing ant. The earth, this junior planet on 
which we move about, seems a spacious 
realm to its inhabitants. We exult when, 
with the help of steam, or in airplanes, we 
“conquer distance.” But what puny dis- 
tance compared to that which separates us 


14 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


from the nearest fixed star! Geocentrism 
has been displaced by heliocentrism. Helio- 
centrism, in turn, the claim of the sun, sur- 
rounded by its satellites, to a sovereign place 
in the heavens, has become ridiculous in the 
face of the wilderness of suns that people the 
abysses beyond us. Astronomy, with every 
added perfection of its instruments, is re- 
vealing ever more and more those stellar, 
solar multitudes. 

As with space, so with time. The geo- 
logic periods reduce the span of human life 
to a duration almost imperceptible. The 
ephemeridz live from morning to night— 
a single day is allotted to their existence. 
The day of a man, the vaunted threescore 
years and ten, is longer, but compared with 
the ages and the eons, is like the inhalation 
and exhalation of a breath. In every way, 
spatially and temporally, we are dwindling. 

And not only as to quantity, but as to the 
quality of life, we seem to be losing caste. 
Darwinism, the evolutionary theory, it 
would appear, administered the last stroke 


DE PROFUNDIS Is 


to our prerogative. The long procession of 
life-forms that has preceded us is unfolded 
to our vision. An humble place in the ranks 
is assigned to us. Is there any valid reason 
for supposing that we are more worth while 
than our predecessors?—insects, serpents, 
sheep and oxen, the carnivore. We do not 
claim for them an exalted significance in the 
scheme of things. They are products of na- 
ture, so are we. They have their noxious or 
kindly traits, so have we. They are waves 
of the flux, so are we. All our higher facul- 
ties, our mentality and our morality, is but 
the development of instincts latent at the 
bottom of the scale of life; the highest out- 
reachings and aspirations we cherish, so we 
are told, are to be explained as outcroppings 
from below, no longer as apprehension of 
what is supremely above. Hume says: “In 
the sight of the universe, man is of no more 
account than an oyster.”’ If Hume were liv- 
ing to-day, with what more drastic empha- 
sis would he propound this depressing con- 
clusion! Now a philosopher, placing him- 


16 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


self in his dispassionate survey on a level 
with what is least considerable, may find a 
kind of exaltation of himself in his very dis- 
passionateness; but on the average man the 
teachings of science fall like a pall, they are 
a heavy weight under which his self-respect 
endures an incurable depression. And note 
that when men think meanly of themselves, 
they are apt to act meanly; when men re- 
gard themselves as animals, they are apt to 
behave as such. 

Now no intelligent person will publish 
himself an obscurantist and a fool by disput- 
ing the teachings of science. The problem is 
to extricate oneself from this heavy burden 
that rests upon self-consciousness, without 
stultifying the mind by subterfuges or eva- 
sions. ‘The truths of science must be re- 
ceived as such, but a way must also be found 
of not only vindicating, but enhancing the 
spiritual prerogative of man, of establishing 
as a fact that there exists in him a spiritual 
nature which exalts him, which gives him a 
unique place in the scheme of things. Seen 


DE PROFUNDIS 17 


from one point of view he is like Hume’s oy- 
ster, or like oxen and sheep, a mere product 
of physical evolution; known from another 
point of view, he is far more than a develop- 
ment of the inferior life-forms. He is a wit- 
ness of the infinite striking into the finite 
world. <A reconstructed ethical ideal must 
make good this proposition, must relieve 
mankind of the pain, the depression, due to 
profound self-depreciation and_ self-con- 
tempt. 

The second mode of pain, which is felt far 
more acutely at present than at any other 
time, is due to the fate of those innumerable 
fellow beings who perish by the wayside, 
while mankind slowly and awkwardly tries 
to achieve progress—I mean those many 
thousands who are dying unhelped in the 
hospitals, I mean the victims of the foul con- 
ditions that exist in the slums, I mean the 
millions of young lives that were cut short 
during the late war. We stand, as it were, 
on the shore, and see multitudes of our fel- 
low beings struggling in the water, stretch- 


18 SPIRITUAL DEAL 


ing forth their arms, sinking, drowning, and 
we are powerless to assist them. We deceive 
ourselves as to the nature of the problem 
when we say that we will bend our energies 
to prevent others from perishing. That of 
course we are called upon to do by every 
spark of moral feeling. ‘We must be inces- 
sant in our efforts to improve material con- 
ditions, but can we therefore avert our faces 
from the awful moral problem of those who 
perish in the meantime? 

We have come to see a new relation be- 
tween health, wealth, material goods gen- 
erally and the spiritual nature of man, 
namely, the instrumental relation. ‘The as- 
cetics of all ages have said that material 
conditions are negligible; that wealth is a 
thing indifferent, or even a hindrance. The 
secular-minded person of to-day looks upon 
wealth as an end in itself. The ethical point 
of views is that material goods are to be es- 
teemed as ministerial to moral development, 
or to the manifestation of that worth which 
is latent in all men, and this implies that 


DE PROFUNDIS 19 


wealth is only to be esteemed in so far as 
it is ministerial to the higher development of 
man. 

On this account we must be intolerant of 
bad material conditions, we must use our ut- 
most efforts to abolish the foul slum, to en- 
courage research into the causes and cure of 
disease. We must not flag in the war 
against war. And yet at the same time, here 
is the paradox in our inmost spirit, we must 
be patient of those very evils that will con- 
tinue to endure, no one can say how long, 
and we must also exact patience of those who 
suffer the most. We are in the habit of say- 
ing “evolution not revolution,” and we can- 
not help using such expressions, but we 
must be aware of what is involved in them, 
we may not shirk the issue. What is im- 
plied is that many will have to die without 
the health and wealth and education which 
we acknowledge to be instrumental to the 
development of the spiritual nature of men, 
before the necessary changes can be effected. 

The forgotten man whom the social re- 


20 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


former is apt to overlook is the man who 
perishes in the meanwhile, before the 
schemes of social reform can even begin to 
be adequately carried out. The social re- 
former is apt to live in his vision of the fu- 
ture, to feed on that vision by way of antici- 
pation, and to console those who are un- 
happy to-day by the prospect of happiness 
to come. To be effective, however, this 
method must represent the desirable changes 
as proximate, and this is contrary to the slow 
tempo inexorably prescribed by the facts of 
mass psychology. Or, if this method 1s 
avoided, if the social reformer is of a gentle 
type, not “scientific” in the fashion of the 
Marxists, if he shrinks from cutting the Gor- 
dian knot, he will have to fall back on sym- 
pathy as a means of making those who suffer 
in the meantime contented with their lot, as- 
suming, as then he must, that the sunny pic- 
ture of universal happiness in the next gen- 
eration, or the next after the next, will cast a 
reflected gladness into the hearts of those 
who threaten to sink under the heavy bur- 


DE PROFUNDIS 21 


dens which they bear at present. But sym- 
pathy depends on a vivid imagination, which 
is usually the gift of the reformers them- 
selves, but hardly of the generality of man- 
kind. Again, sympathy is intermittent in 
its action, flowing and ebbing; and sym- 
pathy, so far as it calls upon men to sacrifice 
the happiness of those who live to-day to 
those who will live later on, is inconsistent 
with the ethical doctrine of the equal worth 
of all human beings. Why should I be a 
mere stepping stone over which the crowd 
is to pass to its earthly Elysium? 
Moreover, there is a distinction between 
extensive and intensive sympathy. The for- 
mer extends over the indiscriminate mass, 
embraces in a vague way humanity in gen- 
eral. It is wide but shallow, easily kindled 
into enthusiasm, but, save in exceptional in- 
dividuals, not a constant driving force. The 
latter, the intensive sympathy, fastens upon 
near objects, on friend and brother, wife and 
child; and when it happens that one of these 
near and dear objects is about to perish in 


22 SPIRITUAL TDEAL 


the meantime, this intensive sympathy re- 
sents and rebels against any form of conso- 
lation dependent on the sacrifice of the pres- 
ent to the future. The mother who sees her 
child succumbing to a disease which medical 
science has not conquered, will ask: Why 
should my child die in order that others 
may live? Why should this dear head be- 
come dust in order that other people’s chil- 
dren may grow up happy? No, sympathy 
does not by any means meet the painful 
problem which I am emphasizing. Marcus 
Aurelius justly said: “It is possible to be a 
man, even ina palace”; and we may and must 
say that it is possible for a man to be a man 
even in the slums. Yes, this is not only a 
possibility, but an actuality. Many a man, 
many a woman especially, exemplifies the 
dignity of human nature amid the most re- 
pellent conditions. We must therefore pro- 
ceed in both directions. We must sharpen 
the effort to improve those conditions which 
are instrumental to the development of the 
moral nature of man. There must be no re- 


DE PROFUNDIS 23 


laxtion, no lying down under the difficulties 
that bar the way, and at the same time we 
must vindicate the present worth which is 
independent of conditions. The spiritual 
ideal must meet both these requirements. 
And let me say, in concluding my remarks 
on this point, that the problem of those who 
perish in the meantime will never cease to 
exist. For let poverty be no more, let dis- 
ease be abolished (although we are told by 
medical authorities of new diseases that are 
appearing, diseases of civilization), let all the 
gerosser, more palpable evils of society be re- 
moved—yet, in the progress of science, and 
in the more complex adjustments of human 
beings to one another, as the idiosyncrasies 
of individuals become more pronounced, 
there will always be those who are unequal 
to the new tasks imposed and to the gains 
achieved by the more advanced, and who, in 
a certain sense, will perish in the meantime. 
The grosser problems with which mankind 
still has to deal are in a way a screen that 
hides the finer, more subtle, and certainly 


24 SPIRITURE VID Es 


not less painful problems which will face 
mankind hereafter. 

The third problem is constituted by the 
need of relief from the intolerable strain of 
the divided conscience. “A house divided 
against itself cannot stand;” human nature 
in revolt against itself cannot rest. By the 
divided conscience I do not mean what is 
sometimes called the departmentalized con- 
science, or the arrangement, so to speak, of 
water-tight compartments in the inner life. 
Of that indeed we see many examples, as in 
the case of persons who are fine and even 
exquisite in their private relations, but are 
hard as nails in business, unscrupulous par- 
tisans in politics, or lying diplomatists for 
their country’s supposed good. But the in- 
tolerable strain of the divided conscience of 
which I speak is felt by men who are eagerly 
desirous to make their life whole, all of a 
piece, of achieving consistency in their con- 
duct throughout, and who do not see how 
to do it because they find that the ethical 
standard which they acknowledge in their 


DE PROFUNDIS 25 


private relations, and which they would like 
to expand so as to cover their business and 
professional relations, their conduct as citi- 
zens, is incapable of such expansion. In 
other words, they have a moral standard to 
hold to when they deal as individuals with 
other individuals, but find themselves desti- 
tute of any sufficient moral standard to guide 
them where they are required to act as mem- 
bers of groups.° The absence of a standard 
regulating the morality of groups is to-day 
the great, the crying defect. The family 1s 
one such group; the duties of the man toward 
the woman and of the woman toward the 
man, of the two adults toward their children, 
cannot be governed on the private moral 
standard furnished by the Golden Rule. 
That rule says: Put yourselves in the 
other’s place, and then in imagination decide 
upon the other’s rights according to the 


6 A man engaged in large business transactions approached 
a Christian clergyman of my acquaintance with this request: 
Can you tell me how I can lead the Christian life in business ?” 
and the clergyman confided to me that he had found it difficult 
to give a satisfactory answer. Difficult—I  reflected—on 
Christian premises, is it possible? 


26 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


claims which you yourself would feel justi- 
fied in making. The Golden Rule assumes 
that the parties concerned are related as like 
to like. Hence the imaginary transposition 
of oneself into the other’s place decides what 
is right. But men and women are unlike, 
adults and children are unlike, the claims and 
obligations on either side are unlike. The 
various vocations—agricultural, industrial, 
commercial, professional—are exercised in 
groups. The relations within these groups 
are those of the unlike to the unlike. So are 
nations groups; and it is just a morality of 
groups, both an internal morality, that of 
the members of the groups to one another, 
and an external morality, that of the groups 
to other groups—it is just this immense 
need of a morality of groups that has not 
been met. Where there should be definite 
standards there are none; where there 
should be ideals of behavior there is a void. 

I submit that the reconstruction of the 
moral ideal is indispensable as a basis for the 
reconstruction of society. It is the necessity 


DE PROFUNDIS 27 


of working out the morality of groups that 
makes this task of reconstruction from the 
practical point of view so incontestably ur- 
gent, and it is to this task that I shall 
endeavor to contribute in the chapters on 
“Permanence and Impermanence in Mar- 
riage,’ on “The Ideal of Social Reconstruc- 
tion,’ on ‘‘The State and International Re- 
lations.” 

To what has been said I wish to subjoin 
three points. 

1. The reconstruction of the moral ideal 
does not mean merely extending the field 
covered by the ethical principle. It does not 
mean merely adding new ethical provinces, 
such as business morality, political moral- 
ity, international morality to the province of 
private morality already covered. The same 
ethical principle must run like a golden 
thread through all human relations, and the 
new applications in the wider group relations 
will inevitably react upon the morality of 
the private life, correcting and deepening it. 
Thus the moral attitude toward the sense 


28 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


part of man, the moral attitude toward 
wealth, the moral attitude in respect to 
nonresistance, as enjoined by the traditional 
private morality, will be profoundly modified 
by the attempt to discover a rule of conduct 
embracing the public as well as the private 
life. Business ethics, political ethics, and 
international ethics will be found in many 
ways to transform private ethics. 

2. In default of an ethical principle to 
govern the relations of groups to one an- 
other, since the social order depends upon 
the adoption of some principle governing the 
relation of groups, history shows that one 
dominant group has invariably subordinated 
and oppressed the others. And that group 
dominated which exercised the particular 
function at any one time esteemed the most 
distinguished. Thus the sacerdotal func- 
tion as exercised by the Brahmins was es- 
teemed in India the most distinguished, that 
in which the excellence of human nature was 
most manifest (for the Brahmin was pow- 
erful enough to compel the gods themselves 


DE PROFUNDIS 29 


to do his bidding) and in consequence the 
arrangement of the social groups was based 
on the predominance of the Brahmin priest- 
hood. Under the feudal constitution of so- 
ciety the exercise of the military function 
was most esteemed. In capitalistic society 
the function of wealth accumulation domi- 
nates. Some one function hitherto has al- 
ways been ranked above the rest, and the so- 
cial groups have been ranked hierarchically 
accordingly. The ethical problem, the real 
problem, for instance, of what we call democ- 
racy is, to place all functions on a level with 
respect to the worth of those who exercise 
them, and to propound a spiritual ideal in 
which this equality may be realized, not de- 
spite the inequalities, but by their interac- 
tion. 

3. Plato, the philosopher, was of the opin- 
ion that the ills of society would be cured if 
only the philosophers could be induced, how- 
ever reluctantly, to become rulers. I have 
often asked myself, in attending philosophic 
_ congresses or listening to the discussions in 


30 SPIRITUAL JDEAL 


philosophic clubs, what would happen if 
these our modern philosophers were invited 
to undertake the office which Plato would 
assign to them. I do not intend here to in- 
dulge in cheap innuendo against philosophy. 
Philosophic speculation has had and still 
has its high uses. The brave attempt to em- 
brace in one synoptic view the lofty prob- 
lems of the mind is bracing even where it 
fails, and besides, each of the great systems 
has been stimulating outside its field in the 
sciences and arts. Iron-clad agreement is 
not the ultimate test. Disagreement also 
has its value. But just in the field of ethics 
the outcome of speculation has been gravely 
disappointing, and the reason, I take it, is 
that the prime interest of philosophers as a 
rule has been scientific or logical, or per- 
haps zxsthetic, not ethical; and on this ac- 
count they have approached the problems of 
ethics with ruling concepts derived from 
their preoccupation with physical science, 
or biology, or zsthetics, and have then en- 
deavored to fit the data of ethics into a 


DE PROFUNDIS aye 


scheme derived from data outside the field 
of ethics. In Aristotle’s philosophy the dia- 
noétic virtues tower high above the ethical. 
In Kant, the Newtonian physics shines 
through the Categorical Imperative, how- 
ever sublimely proclaimed; in Hegel the dia- 
lectic process determines his reasoning on 
moral as well as other questions. 

Is it not possible to take a new turn in 
ethical philosophy, to insist that ethical the- 
ory shall be based primarily upon ethical 
data, and shall aim directly, and not by way 
of circumlocution, at the solution of the dis- 
tinctly ethical problem?—and by the ethical 
problem I mean that of reconciling the indi- 
vidual sacred as an end per se to other in- 
dividuals no less sacred than himself. It is 
true that the Hebrew and Christian religions 
have built on this foundation, but their ideals 
contain a large admixture of mythological 
and other elements derived from nonethical 
sources. Is it not possible to have a pure 
ethical ideal? Cannot a theory be proposed 
—for a theory of some sort we must have; 


32 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


the regulation of conduct cannot be left to 
mere instinct or sentiment—which shall 
consult the ethical data exclusively to begin 
with, shall seek to fit itself to these data, and 
not the data to itself, and which shall still 
be subject to revision as ethical data accumu- 
late, as ethical experience widens and deep- 
ens? 


IT 
Hie, SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


HAT an ideal, in order to be objective, 
must correspond to certain deep-felt 
needs has been set forth in the previous 
chapter. The correspondence is required, 
but on what principle shall the ideal be 
framed so as to meet this requirement? 
How shall we go about effecting the neces- 
sary changes in the ideal? 

The thesis of the present chapter is that 
the spiritual ideal takes one shape or another 
according to the way in which the spiritual 
nature is defined. In brief, the spiritual 
ideal was originally gained by defining the 
spiritual nature in a certain way. This orig- 
inal definition is found in the Hebrew re- 
ligion. The spiritual ideal was then recon- 
structed—that is exactly the word to be used 
—in a second act of definition. Two stages 

33 


34 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


of definition have been passed, a third, a new 
reconstruction, now awaits us. In the He- 
brew religion the spiritual part of man was 
conceived under the attribute “holy.” The 
Spiritual nature is a holy thing. Now the 
primary meaning of holy is aloof, separate; 
a holy being is one who keeps himself sep- 
arate, who is inaccessible within his pre- 
cinct, whom it is perilous to approach too 
closely, who resents and punishes trespass 
on the territory he occupies. The sentiment 
inspired by such a conception is one of awe: 
“Take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for 
the place whereon thou standest is holy 
ground.” 

The Hebrews defined the spiritual nature 
of man by circumscription of its sphere, by 
the delimitation of its frontiers, and the chief 
ethical rule derived was—Thou shalt not 
trespass, not on the life, not on the property, 
not on the reputation of another; thou shalt 
not invade, thou shalt not encroach, for holi- 
ness does not permit encroachment or in- 
vasion. 


THE PSPIRVIUAL IDEAL 35 


The Hebrew did not venture to examine 
the spiritual nature per se, he stood too 
much in dread of it, in awe of it. The spir- 
itual nature of man is like the spiritual na. 
ture of God, the latter merely raising the 
former to the mth degree. A’ similar atti- 
tude as to the Holy One of Israel is pre- 
scribed toward man. “Thou canst not see 
His face and live;’’ neither can anyone really 
penetrate the inner sanctuary, the soul of 
man, nor see a shape within the inner sanc- 
tuary of the soul of man. It is a significant 
fact that stories of ghosts or apparitions are 
almost absent in the Old Testament. At 
any rate the spiritual was not conceived of as 
ghostly by the teachers of the Hebrew re- 
ligion, and necromancy, which attempts to 
come into communication with the dead, 
that is, to deal with ghosts, was especially 
abhorrent to the prophetic writers. 

It is true to say that the Hebrew religion 
conceived of the spiritual nature of man 
ethically, but we should always be on our 
guard against injecting into such words as 


36 SPIRITUAL VED BAe 


“ethical,” a modern modification of mean- 
ing. “Ethical” in general refers to the way 
in which a man ought to behave to his fel- 
lowmen, the way in which it is right that he 
should behave. But there are all sorts of 
Opinions as to how a man ought to behave. 
And therefore to say that the spiritual na- 
ture was conceived as ethical by the He- 
brews is not sufficiently descriptive. Rather 
their ethics was derived from their concep- 
tion of the spiritual nature. The right way 
to behave, according to them, was to honor 
in one’s conduct the holy presence in human 
beings, and to honor it more particularly 
by not invading their personality, or en- 
croaching upon it. Hence the conspicuous 
place occupied by the idea of justice in the 
ethics of the Hebrews.* Justice with them 
meant essentially the awe-inspired respect 
for the personality of others; and since op- 


1 justice, too, is a general term that covers many diverse 
meanings. For instance, in Plato’s Republic it connotes an ar- 
rangement by which every human peg is put into its appropri- 
ate hole. It is an attribute pertaining to a hierarchical ar- 
rangement of society in which the inequalities of human nature 
are stressed, whereas in the Hebrew conception of justice the 
equality is stressed. 


TEE’ SPIRITUALCIDEALT 37 


pression is a most flagrant manifestation of 
disrespect for the personality of others, the 
oppressor is marked throughout the Hebrew 
Scriptures as the typical enemy of the holi- 
ness idea, and the final disappearance of op- 
pression is represented as synonymous with 
the realization of justice, and as the goal of 
the history of mankind. A too narrow view 
of justice, one might say, from the modern 
point of view, but immensely valuable and 
true as far as it goes.” 

The holiness idea, I repeat, is thus to be 
regarded as furnishing the ruling principle 
in this ethical scheme. Justice is the first 
and chief practical corollary derived from it. 
Do not violate the rights of others, such 
rights being due to the holy presence in 
them. Mercy and humility are the two other 
practical corollaries. “For what doth the 
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to 
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 


2Note the difference between the above and the nolle me 
tangere formula of Mill, the liberty of the individual within 
the limits of noninterference with the liberty of others. In the 
one case you have liberty a purely naturalistic attribute, in 
the other case you have a spiritual attribute. 


38 SPIRTTRU ADA Rte 


God?” The ever-recurrent examples of 
mercy are, care for widows and orphans, that 
is, protection of the unprotected, of those 
who are destitute of the physical force to 
make good their rights—rights which in 
their case also are due to the holy presence 
inhabiting them. It is evident that the 
greater the personal dignity we ascribe to 
human beings, the more unendurable will it 
be to see such a one reduced to the last 
extremities of indigence and suffering. The 
feeling thus aroused is similar to that ex- 
cited when we behold the scion of a noble 
house reduced to beggary, or a king’s son in 
rags. Every human being, in virtue of the 
spiritual or holy nature is, as it were, clothed 
with something of the attribute of sover- 
eignty and the sight of such a being in ex- 
treme indigence evokes the kind of feeling 
denoted by the Hebrew conception of mercy. 
Humility again is induced by the sense of 
one’s failure to live up to the acknowledged 
standard of conduct, and by an estimate of 


THE SPIRITUAL IDEAL — 39 


the distance that separates man from his 
own supreme ideal of holiness. 

There are other more subtle developments 
of the Hebrew ethics, for instance, the idea 
of the vicarious, expiatory suffering of the 
innocent (Isaiah liii), namely, the suffering 
of Israel for the salvation of those peoples 
of the earth who have not won the same in- 
sight into the holiness ideal acknowledged 
by Israel. But it is unnecessary here to fol- 
low this evolution of the Hebrew thought. 
The main point I am setting forth is that the 
Hebrew ideal was shaped according to a 
certain method, namely, by a definition of 
the spiritual nature, that the Hebrews did 
not attempt to define that nature as it is in 
itself, but defined its frontiers, and that in 
the main, in an initial thrust at all events, 
the practical rules of conduct are summa- 
rized in the dictum ‘Thou shall not tres- 
pass.” 

In the second, the Christian stage, defini- 
tion went a step farther. The territory of 
the inner life was boldly entered. The aw- 


40 SPIRETUAESLD RAT 


ful sense of aloofness had to some extent 
diminished, and a bifurcation was attempted 
within the inner man. The holy thing in 
him was separated off by a sharper distinc- 
tion between it and the things in him that 
are not holy, such as appetite, anger, pas- 
sion, pride—“He who looketh upon a woman 
with an unclean eye hath already committed 
adultery in his heart,” etc.; “Leave there thy 
gift before the altar;”’ “If anyone compel 
thee to go with him a mile, go with him 
twain.” The problem had taken a new turn. 
It was no longer the holy people but the holy 
individual that constituted the chief object of 
concern. For the national state had fallen 
into ruins, and the individual was to work out 
his spiritual destiny no longer as included in 
an ideally just community, but standing on 
his own feet, remitted to his own resources 
—just a man, loose from the national con- 
nections, no longer leaning on public law, 
but dependent on his own effort, or, if that 
should fail him, as soon became apparent, on 


ioe Ne Ae AI 


the personal assistance of a superhuman, 
divine individual. 

What concerns us here for our purpose is 
the change in the spiritual ideal brought 
about by the new step taken in definition. 
The ideal of holiness remains. But holiness 
is no longer primarily manifested in justice 
and the like, in action, in one’s relation to 
others. It is primarily manifested in that 
which takes place within the man himself. 
The holy thing is defined by contrast with 
the unholy things in a man; and holiness 
consists in segregating the holy nature from 
the unholy, in extricating the spirit from its 
entanglement with appetites, passion and 
pride. The spiritual nature of man is thus 
defined by way of negation. It is that which 
is not of the world, the flesh, or of the prin- 
ciple of darkness, which is not our worldly 
nature, carnal nature, obscurely evil nature. 
And if justice is the ruling concept in the 
Hebrew ethics, then purity, in the sense of 
freedom from admixture, is the ruling con- 


42 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


cept in this earliest type of the Christian 
ethics. 

But there is also a positive connotation 
to this new definition, for freedom from ad- 
mixture implies a substantive something 
which repels foreign elements, which seeks 
to maintain its unbroken integrity, its self- 
identity. The spiritual nature is thus con- 
ceived as unitary, as self-identical. It is 
engaged, during its finite experience, in re- 
sisting those influences which seek to drag 
it away from its own ground, to induce self- 
alienation, or departure from itself. The 
metaphysical idea latent in the Christian 
ethic—and a metaphysical idea of some sort 
is latent in every ethical system—is that 
of self-conservation, self-affirmation, “self’’ 
meaning an indefeasible, unitary entity. 

But man is only too well aware of his fre- 
quent departure from this high, self-resting 
posture, is only too often reminded of the 
concessions he makes to his worldly, carnal, 
and obscurely evil nature. Life, therefore, 
is a kind of moral agony, an incessant com- 


Pieob LRU RUA Per rAT, 43 


bat against attacking forces! and this con- 
flict is only terminable, the agony is only 
pacified, when the unitary self sets its face 
unyieldingly toward the supreme One, the 
divine ideal of unity in whom there is no 
change nor shadow of turning. 

For man, the earthly pilgrim, there is a ter- 
minus a quo and a terminus ad quem. ‘The 
terminus a quo is the manifold, not only the 
manifold of the senses, but also the manifold 
of this picturesque world so far as it ex- 
cites intellectual curiosity. For science, too, | 
and the pursuit of profane knowledge, is to 
be shunned as drawing the soul away from 
its centre (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’’). 
And the terminus ad quem is God the One. 

I have pointed out the negative and the 
positive aspects of the spiritual nature as 
defined in the Christian ethic; the social as- 
pect of it is no less subtly significant. This 
was expressed in the development undergone 
by the Hebrew idea of mercy in the Chris- 
tian idea of love. There was a note of ten- 
derness in the Hebrew idea of mercy. This 


44 SPIRITUATAID PA 


received a newly nuanced mellowness in 
Christian love. Individualism, I reassert, 
was the starting-point. The Christian was 
concerned with the distinction between the 
holy thing and the unholy things in himself, 
but every individual soul was or might be a 
temple of the Holy Ghost, was inhabited by 
the same holy presence. Every human being 
was or might be a pilgrim journeying from 
the terminus a quo to the terminus ad quem, 
from the world of the manifold toward the 
infinite One. Now love, primarily, was the 
sense of companionship with others who are 
journeying on the same road, and a feeling 
of keen desire to help them on the way. 
Hence the chief expression of Christian love 
always has been and is the promulgation of 
the faith, since it is impossible to render a 
greater service to any fellow-being than to 
promote his reaching the ultimate goal. 
This was the real charity or caritas, and it 
charity also took on its more palpable forms, 
of feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and 
the like, such acts of charity were symbolic 


Ie bd, SiO MOP CADAD Mw: 45 


rather than pragmatic in object. They re- 
sembled the offering of a flower to a beloved 
person, a tribute to his preciousness, rather 
than a gift valued for its material use. If 
the young man was directed by Jesus to sell 
all that he had and give it to the poor, it was 
not intended that he should confer wealth 
on the poor, which would have been a con- 
tradiction in terms, but that he should mani- 
fest both his own independence of wealth 
and his appreciation of the personality of 
those whose extreme indigence he relieved. 

One might say God is the spiritual sun, 
and every human soul a ray of that sun. 
The destiny of each individual is to travel 
along the line of that ray, backward, up- 
ward, toward the central light. And love 
is the sense of latent luminousness in all our 
fellow pilgrims. Love is the sense of indi- 
rect union with them (by a detour, as it 
were) by way of the common focus of all our 
natures—only that this simile might suggest 
a pantheistic construction of the relations of 
men to the Deity. And while undoubtedly 


46 SPIRDTG AED as 


there was a pantheistic strain in the Chris- 
tian consciousness, as when Paul speaks of 
the time when God shall be all in all, yet 
actual pantheism was prevented by the eth- 
ical conception of man. For, despite his re- 
lations to God, he is still somehow qua eth- 
ical, an independent being, responsible for 
his acts, so that though the company of spir- 
its yearns towards God, travels onward 
toward God, they are never merged with 
God, submerged in God, their final destiny 
being pictured as that of a company of souls 
surrounding the supreme spirit, dwelling in 
the light of his presence. 

A third step in the definition of the spir- 
itual nature is now required. ‘The situation 
in which the world finds itself demands it. 
The historical situation, and the needs in it 
as felt by ethically sensitive minds, is ever 
the challenge that provokes the construc- 
tion or reconstruction of the spiritual ideal. 
Not that the historical situation is the cause, 
it is the evocative occasion. Thus the black 
fact of oppression was the challenge that 


OT Bes Pe URTED UAveS LEB AT? 47 


provoked the Hebrew ideal of justice. “Woe 
to them who add land to land, that grind the 
faces of the poor, etc.” The forsakenness 
of the individual when the national state 
failed as a moral support, the return of the 
individual upon himself, as described above, 
evoked the Christian ideal. And the triple 
need of our own generation, as set forth in 
the first lecture, more particularly the need 
of a group morality, is the challenge to those 
who are ethically sensitive for the forma- 
tion, the reformation, the reconstruction of 
a spiritual ideal that shall be apt to respond 
to the need. How shall this be produced? 
I have already said it—by definition, by a 
stricter definition, by coming to closer quar- 
ters with the spiritual nature, taking hold of 
it mentally with a firmer grasp. 

We need a morality of groups. The 
groups are the family, the vocational group, 
the state, the nations comprised within the 
international society. Each group consists 
of, is constituted by, unlike individuals ex- 
ercising unlike functions. The unlikeness 


48 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


of function is the mark that distinguishes a 
group from a herd. In the family the dis- 
similarity is that of the two sexes, the dis- 
similarity of age, of the adults and their off- 
spring. In the vocational groups the dis- 
similarity is that of talents. In the state the 
dissimilarity is that of the agricultural, in- 
dustrial, commercial, professional groups, 
fulfilling different types of social service. In 
the international group the dissimilarity is 
that of the various types of civilization rep- 
resented by the different peoples. As will 
be seen, the desirable relations within the 
groups, and of the groups to one another, 
is what is commonly called organic. But 
this word organic must be subjected to an 
extremely careful inspection. An organism 
is described as a whole the parts of which 
are mutually dependent in such sort that 
each part or member in the fulfillment of its 
distinctive function conditions the discharge 
of function by the rest, and is in turn con- 
ditioned in the fulfillment of its function by 


PEASE URE ATED nals 49 


the rest. In this sense the whole is present 
in each part, and each part indispensable 
to the whole. But where can such an or- 
ganism be found—an example that corre- 
sponds) co,ithe’ idea ots stich)-ay necessary 
relation of parts to one another as is im- 
plied in the definition? For the relation, 
note well, must be a necessary one; each 
member in functioning must be the indispen- 
sable condition of the functioning of the rest 
—otherwise the relation is fortuitous, and 
Uommtriiy mone woreinterdependence,. Lhe 
animal body is not an example, though it is 
superficially, vulgarly used as such. There 
are in it rudimentary parts. The coopera- 
tion of the different parts is imperfect. Of 
the five senses we cannot say that they are 
necessary, such as they are, that more per- 
fect instruments would not be conceivable, 
or that the addition of a sixth or seventh 
sense would not facilitate the smooth work- 
ing of the others, and prolong the body’s ex- 





3 The cause and effect interpenetrate. _ That which is cause 
is at the same time effect, and that which is effect is simul- 
taneously cause. 


50 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


istence. Finally the absence of necessity in 
that physical system which we call the body 
is demonstrated beyond dispute by its fatal, 
inescapable dissolution, by the fragility of 
the coherence of its parts. If the coherence 
were necessary it could not cease. That is 
“necessary” the nonexistence of which is 
unthinkable. 

If, then, there is no actual example of an 
organism, if what we see in plants and ani- 
mals, and still more imperfectly in human 
society, are adumbrations of an idea which 
we carry in the mind, not drawn from ex- 
ternal experience, but applied to it as a stand- 
ard, how does it arise in the mind? The two 
polar conceptions in the mind are that of 
unity and that of plurality. There have 
been many attempts in the history of philos- 
ophy to ignore one of these polar concepts, 
in consequence of a predilection for the other. 
There have been monistic systems and plur- 
alistic systems, vain attempts to exhibit how 
difference can be drawn out of the bosom of 
unity; futile attempts to show how unity can 


THE SPIRITUAIZ TDEAL oI 


be wrought out of sheer pluralities. The 
truth is that unity and plurality are two 
blades of a pair of shears, and that one can 
cut with neither singly; that one can derive 
neither from the other, the mind being con- 
strained to use them jointly. It is this joint 
use that has led to every actual gain in 
knowledge. It is this joint use on which the 
progress of mankind in the quest of objec- 
tive reality depends. Ever there must be 
singled out some manifold which shall be 
at the same time comprehended as a unity. 
But whatever manifold is given in experi- 
ence, such as the manifold of space in geome- 
try, the manifold of sequence in physics, etc., 
is ever incomplete, partial, and on this ac- 
count the fundamental impulse of the mind 
toward the unification of manifoldness, to- 
ward the complete interpretation of the two 
polar concepts, can never be satisfied. There 
is ever a surplus of plurality not embraced, 
the total field is never covered, the task re- 
mains exasperatingly unachieved. 

Now the ideal of a system such as is de- 


52 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


noted by the word “organism” is nothing 
else than the ideal produced by the mind of 
the complete use of the two polar concepts. 
It is the ideal of a plurality infinite in quan- 
tity, the parts of which are infinitely diverse 
in quality, while at the same time the rela- 
tion between them is a necessary one, that 
is to say that the nonexistence of any one of 
the infinite diverse parts is unthinkable. 
Each in its place is indispensable to the 
whole, the whole in its effect is indispensable 
toeach. The organic ideal thus conceived is 
the outgrowth of the search of the mind for 
objective reality. The objectively real is 
that which is necessarily actual. The mind’s 
search has led it beyond finite experience 
into transcendental regions. ‘There in the 
transcendental the mind plants its uttermost 
conception of objective reality. 

But you will say that all this construction 
is metaphysical, and what is its bearing on 
the problems of group morality? What has 
it to do with the cry de profundis—with the 
disorders of the world and the problems of 


THE SPIRITUAL IDEAL 83 


social reconstruction? There is a certain 
metaphysic, as I have already observed, un- 
derlying every ethic. It is usually latent. 
There are metaphysical powers that work in 
what the Freudians call the subconscious, 
even in the case of those who are least aware 
of them, and there is gain in exposing them, 
at least to the metaphysically inclined. For 
the average man, and even for the metaphy- 
sician himself, however, it is not the abstrac- 
tion, but the force which penetrates into con- 
sciousness, that works, that moves, that in- 
fluences. And in the case of the subject with 
which we are dealing it is ethical experi- 
ence, certain facts of moral consciousness, 
that give vitality to what might otherwise 
seem shadowy. 

The fact of moral consciousness that 
counts above all others is the judgment that 
man is anend per se. To say end per se is 
to attribute to him worth. In this form we 
retain the Hebrew concept of holiness. 
Holiness equals end per se. But worth must 
be distinguished from value, and this distinc- 


54 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


tion is of the most far-reaching importance. 
Value is a relative term—relative to him or 
to those who evaluate. If he or those who 
evaluate were to disappear, value would dis- 
appear. But to say worth, or end per se, is 
to make a cosmic pronouncement, is to af- 
firm of man, that is, of the spiritual nature 
of man, a preciousness that would remain 
though all the finite world, and all the finite 
beings that inhabit it were swept away. To 
say end per se, or worth, of man is to place 
him (so far as his spiritual nature is con- 
cerned) as a member in that infinite plural- 
ity infinitely unified, the corpus spirituale, 
the infinite organism, of which I have 
spoken. So far as he is regarded as a mem- 
ber of that, he is indispensable; because of 
his spiritual nature his life, his property, 
his reputation, are to be held inviolate. He 
is not to be slain as oxen and sheep are 
slaughtered; he is not to be enslaved, he is 
not to be employed as a mere means to 
any finite ends of his fellows. His repu- 
tation, for instance, is not to be jeopardized 


THE SPIRITUAL IDEAL gs 


to minister to the vanity or pride of his 
fellows. And all this, not because the human 
creature as a product of physical nature 
is deserving of reverence, but because there 
is a holy thing in him, however feebly it 
shines through him. The Hebrew holiness 
is now defined as worth; the Christian prin- 
ciple of self-identity, the irreducible intact- 
ness of the spiritual part of man, is also 
retained but modified, so that to speak 
metaphorically, there shall not be conceived 
the same Christ in all, but so that the 
divine principle shall be conceived as having 
mmciterent face (in each Hore itwasi)the 
unlikeness that is the foundation of the 
reconstructed ethical ideal, the unlikeness of 
the functionary in the infinite corpus spir- 
ituale. It is this unlikeness that makes him 
indispensable, and the being indispensable 
is the essence of his moral character. 

But one more step needs to be taken. We 
speak no more of the God of Hosts, but, as it 
were, of the host as godhead. We speak 
of an infinite society, an infinite choir, a com- 


56 SPIRTRUARS TD Gets 


monwealth of spiritual beings, each of which 
expresses the spiritual nature in a manner 
unlike all the rest. And this unlikeness, 
it must be insisted again, is irreducible. 
The integrity of each member is imperme- 
able. How then can the host become a sys- 
tem? How can the unity of so vast a mul- 
titude of beings be conceived, each one of 
which, in the intimacy of his unlikeness, 
seems inaccessible to the rest. The unity is 
predicable only in the form that the unlike- 
ness of each is such as to elicit the unlike- 
ness in all the rest. And from the scheme of 
relations thus conceived, there is derived a 
new vital practical ethical rule: Seek to 
elicit the best in others, and thereby you will 
bring to light the best that is in yourself; 
evoke the distinctive unlikeness of others, 
and thereby you will promote and produce 
the destructive unlikeness which is your own 
essential self. Seek to educe in the other the 
consciousness of his indispensableness, that 
is, of his membership in the infinite spiritual 
commonwealth, and in so doing you will 


THE SPIRITUAL IDEAT 57 


gain the conviction of your own membership 
therein. You will not save your soul, but 
achieve the unshakeable conviction that you 
are soul, or spirit. 

The spiritual nature is now defined, first 
as holy in the sense of worth; second as ir- 
reducible, in the sense of uniqueness, thirdly 
as organic.* 


4The individualistic ethic, with its individualistic concep- 
tion of divinity, involves that the perfection of infinite being 
exists, and has existed from all eternity in the one God. If 
this be so, man’s existence is superfluous. He is at best an 
imperfect copy of the divine model. And why should such im- 
perfect copies as he and his fellows exist at ali? He is an 
afterthought; he is not indispensable. But this is contrary 
to the ethical judgment of worth, meaning indispensableness. 
The infinite ideal, as sketched above, places man within the 
circle of godhead, where he belongs. He is no longer an out- 
lander, but a citizen. 

The empirical ethical systems, shrinking from metaphysical 
speculation, as too abstract, and seeking to discover concrete 
ground on which to build, have recourse to what appear to be 
palpable traits in human nature such as appeal to common sense. 
The two traits chiefly singled out are selfishness and sympathy. 
There are egoistic systems of ethics and altruistic systems. 
Sidgwick perplexed his mind without success to find a bridge 
between the two; but it suffices here to say that the sure ground 
upon which these systems are built turns out to be the least 
sure, and that in any case no proper ethical judgment can be 
founded on either. 

The error in supposing that the palpable is the sure is being 
increasingly discredited in the domain of science. Helmholtz 
described the force or energy with which the physicist deals, 
as a thing in itself incognisable and unimaginable, known, how- 
ever, in its measurable effects. This he laid down as against 
Goethe, who, in his Theory of Color, impatient of the un- 
imaginable, had insisted that the ultimates of potential visibility 
should be taken as the last terms of permissible scientific 


SOA EP SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


The ethical rule, derived from the spiritual 
ideal, furnishes the morality of groups, both 
internally, and in the relation of groups to 
one another. Let the unlike seek to elicit 
the unlike, but always under the condition 
and with the proviso that the unlike is not 
the merely original, but rather that dissimi- 
larity which is prolific of new dissimilarity, 
and which in action and reaction evokes in 
the participants the consciousness of the in- 
finite spread of the ideal of the manifold. 

In each group there is supplied some natu- 
ral, some empirical motive, favorable to the 
application of the spiritual rule, the sub- 
stratum, as it were, of the spiritual relation 
within that group. In the family it 
is the attraction of the sexes and the 
parental instinct. In the - vocational 


speculation. Helmholtz’s definition of force comes very near 
the notion of a metaphysical entity unknown in itself, but 
known in and through its effects. 

In the above sketch of the spiritual ideal, I have indicated the 
way to advance in the theory of ethics where we are dealing 
with far subtler energies than in physics, beyond the palpabili- 
ties of egotism and sympathy. In ethics also are to be recog- 
nised sources of energy, centralities of spiritual energy, points 
of luminousness unimaginable in themselves, but known in 
their effects. 


PEO RIRERUATAIDE AT 59 


group it is a certain initial interdependence 
never complete between the different 
functionaries in respect to their diverse gifts 
and talents. Similarly in the state it is the 
initial and partial interdependence of the vo- 
cational groups upon one another. In the 
international society it is the partial initial 
dependence for mutual supplementation of 
the different types of civilization represented 
by the different peoples. The morality of 
the groups consists in the spiritualizing of 
the given, natural substratum, and in the at- 
tempt to carry out this task of spiritualisa- 
tion the reality of the spiritual ideal becomes 
matter of experience. 

In the following chapters I shall attempt 
to illustrate what has been here sketched.’ 


5 Spinoza, thinking mathematically, declares that omnis de- 
terminatio est negatio; a thing is determined or defined by 
limitation, that is by exclusion. Thinking spiritually, we shall 
say the exact opposite: omnis determinatio est affirmatio. It is 
true in a sense that a man is a man in so far as he is not 
a woman, in so far as he excludes the qualities of the opposite 
sex; but spiritually it is true that a man becomes a man, 
in marriage for instance, in so far as he seeks to elicit the 
best in woman, the essential womanliness of her and is thereby 
himself modified. It is true that the parent is not a child, 
but he becomes a true parent in so far as he seeks to elicit 
the best that is in the child, the essential nature of the child, and 


60 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


is thereby modified. And so throughout the groups and all the 
relations. We have here a conception of personality that dis- 
tinguishes it from individuality. The individual is the subject 
that is to be personalized. The individual becomes a personality 
in and through his relations as he passes from group to group, 
from the less complex into the more complex, and thus ap- 
proaches, at however great a distance, the infinite society, with 
its infinite scheme of interconnectedness. But the ideal spiritual 
society, or the rule derived from it, must guide his progress 
within each group, and as he passes from group to group 
at every stage. 


II] 


MARRIAGE 


A. married woman of my ac- 
quaintance recently astonished her 
friends by announcing her intention to di- 
vorce her husband. Was she unhappy? 
Had she reason to complain of him? Not 
in the least. On the contrary, she was 
fondly, devotedly attached to him, as he to 
her. It was her intention to go on living 
with him as before. ‘Why, then, the divorce? 
Because she simply could not bear the idea 
of a binding tie, of any relation which, pleas- 
ing though it might be, had in it an element 
of compulsion. The mental attitude of this 
amiable young wife is profoundly sympto- 
matic. Not the tie, but the presumption of 
permanence, the pledging of the will beyond 


the present moment is repugnant to her. 
61 


62 SPIRIT UAT Ae 


And the widespread revolt against what is 
called in general bourgeois morality, and 
against the marriage institution in particu- 
lar, is to no small extent attributable to the 
same cause, namely, impatience of constraint 
in any form, a certain emotional thin-skin- 
nedness that chafes under binding ties, finds 
them intolerable, and seeks to shake them 
off. And because marriage is that relation 
in which the binding tie is most intimate, 
and where nature itself seems to impose 
constraint in the fact of offspring, the attack 
on marriage 1s more vehement and convul- 
sive than on any other of the social institu- 
tions, and marriage has become the storm 
centre of the modern revolt. 

Georg Brandes, the Scandinavian critic, a 
literary authority of the first rank, exhibits 
much the same mental attitude. Speaking 
of Bjornson in a letter to Nietzsche, he de- 
clares that he is maddened to think that 
Bjornson should still hold to the belief in 
the marriage institution. It is true he con- 
cedes that for the multitude there is as yet 


MARRIAGE 63 


no substitute; but that the elect, the en- 
lightened, should still accept the tradition 
of monogamy maddens him. “Maddens” 
seems a curious word. If he had said aston- 
ishes, or even revolts, one could, from his 
point of view, understand; but the kind of 
exasperation—the being beside oneself ex- 
pressed by “maddens”—reveals the psychic 
thin-skinnedness of which I have just 
spoken. 

We are concerned here with the ideal of 
marriage, not simply or principally with the 
facts of marriage as they appear on a survey 
of modern society in civilised countries. An 
ideal is the mental image of a thing desired, 
not yet realised, or only in part realised. 
The ideal of the relation between the sexes 
is such an image of that relation as the con- 
templating mind would rest satisfied with. 
Now different minds will take different views 
of what constitutes a satisfactory relation. 
Some may define it as one which conduces 
to the happiness of the individuals in ques- 
tion, others as a relation which makes for 


64 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


the good of society; others, again, may try 
to combine the two points of view; but what- 
ever the image which wins mental assent, it 
would be manifestly unfair to judge the ideal 
out of hand and absolutely by the degree to 
which it is carried out in practice. The ideal 
is indeed a factor, and a most important one, 
in influencing men’s conduct. There are 
idées-forces, to borrow Fouillée’s phrase, and 
their potency in human affairs cannot be 
denied. But these zdées-forces must enter 
into combination with other forces such as 
peremptory appetites, explosive passions, 
fantastic imaginings, ruthless egotisms; and 
in the final result it is far from easy, nay 
impossible, to assign to the several com- 
ponents their share in producing the result. 
The ideal is the form; human nature, with 
its excesses and defects, is the matter. The 
form should penetrate the matter, but its 
worth cannot be estimated by the degree 
with which it has succeeded in doing so at 
any one time, or at any one stage in the de- 
velopment of the human species. The worth 


MARRIAGE 6s 


of an ideal is determined by two criteria: 
does it, when beheld in its purity, commend 
itself to the mind; and does it on the whole 
tend, is it in its nature to bring into progres- 
sive conformity to itself the practice of men? 

The subject I have undertaken to discuss 
is whether permanence or impermanence in 
marriage represents the true ideal, but, be- 
fore entering on the argument, I should like 
to submit certain considerations which may 
help us to reach a just conclusion. 

1. Marriage as the foundation of the 
family is one of the social institutions. It is 
important for my purpose to distinguish be- 
tween social and ethical, to point out that a 
social institution is not as such an ethical 
institution. It-may be a very unethical in- 
stitution. In tracing the meaning of the 
word social, we find, to begin with, that it 
connotes the opposite of solitary. A solitary 
burglar, for instance, would be one who plays 
a lone hand in a criminal enterprise; a social 
burglar would be the member of a band en- 
gaged on similar business. Social in its 


66 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


primary use means simply “associated” with 
regard to some purpose, whether com- 
mendable or nefarious. Then, by an easy 
transition, it comes to denote, not bare as- 
sociation, but interdependence. A social re- 
lation in this sense arises when several 
persons are mutually dependent, on the 
principle of Do ut des—I satisfy a certain 
want of yours on condition that you satisfy a 
certain want of mine. If human beings were 
self-sufficing there would be no occasion 
for the subdivision of functions, and conse- 
quently no socialrelations. The self-sufficing 
God of Aristotle is an eternally solitary 
being. Nevertheless, though men are com- 
pelled to exchange services, to interlock, as it 
were, it does not follow that the terms on 
which the exchange is effected need be or are 
just. A relation strictly social may be most 
unjust—for example, that of the master and 
the slave. Here the test of sociality is un- 
doubtedly met, there is interdependence, 
there is exchange of services. The master 
gives food and shelter, the slave gives his 


MARRIAGE 67 


labor and liberty. The relation is social, 
but certainly not ethical. Or take the rela- 
tion of the Roman father, armed with the 
patria potestas, to the son, or the relation of 
the British mill owners to their so-called 
“hands,” during the early decades of the 
last century—not to introduce examples from 
nearer home. And. in like manner there 
exists a social relation in marriage and a 
social institution founded on that relation 
where the exchange of services is at the 
basest level (cf. Immanuel Kant’s amazing 
definition of the marriage compact), or 
where, on a higher level, the supremacy of 
the man over the woman is asserted without 
the slightest opposition on her side, and with 
the approval of public opinion. But the 
ethical relation, in contradistinction to the 
social, is that in which the supreme interest 
of each individual is achieved in complete 
harmony with that of all the others. And 
let us be clear upon the point that such har- 
mony has never yet been realised, that it is 
an ideal. No social relation has ever become 


68 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


a completely ethical relation, no social in- 
stitution is worthy of being dignified as an 
entirely ethical institution. A distinguished 
churchman says that there has never been a 
decent government on this earth—of course 
not, if by decent we are to understand a 
political organisation in which the genuine 
interests of all the groups that compose the 
State, and of the individuals that compose 
the groups, are conciliated, or, one may add, 
in which there is even the determinate pur- 
pose on the part of the government to har- 
monise them. And so we have no difficulty 
in conceding to the assailants of marriage 
that this particular social institution, like the 
rest, has never yet conformed to the ethical 
norm, if they will allow that there is a norm. 
There are no doubt degrees of approxima- 
tion, and in the absence of absolute perfec- 
tion we shall not simply confound the higher 
with the lower. But even in the most nearly 
harmonious marriages there is still an inex- 
tinguishable residuum of defect. The ethical 
relation of the sexes is a problem, not a 


MARRIAGE 69 


datum, and the best marriages are those in 
which the sense of the problem as yet to be 
solved is vivid, and the attempt to transform 
the actual after the image of the ideal is 
unrelaxed.’ 

2. Human relations are to a very large 
extent chance relations, and in particular it 
is a matter of chance whether persons to 
whom we are bound by indissoluble ties are 
congenial or uncongenial. A child cannot 
divorce its parents, cannot cancel the fact 
that it is their offspring—a fact which carries 
with it certain prime obligations. And yet 


21] have pointed out above the difference between the two 
terms Social and Ethical. It seems to me unfortunate that this 
difference is so often overlooked. It is an instance of the 
slippery use of the moral vocabulary due to the lack of ex- 
plicit analysis, and sure to breed confusion in practice. Peo- 
ple speak eulogistically of the social attitude of mind, of the 
social spirit, and the like, as if the social point of view were 
necessarily and of itself a commendable one. As a rule, they 
intend thereby to oppose the selfishly individualistic point of 
view—that is to say, they pass from one horn of the dilemma to 
the opposite. The Individual v. Society is the case in court. 
Shall society be sacrificed to the individual, shall egotism domi- 
nate? No. Shall the individual be sacrificed to society, shall 
the State like a huge monster crush the man, shall the multi- 
tude submerge the individual? No, a thousand times no. But 
how shall the two factors be mediated? That is precisely the 
ethical problem. To emphasise the word Social as if it were 
synonymous with Ethical is to obscure the problem, to insist 
on one element, whereas the problem is to bring about an 
agreement of the two. 


70 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


it is notorious that fathers and mothers on 
one side, and sons and daughters on the 
other, are often naturally antipathetic. In- 
deed, one’s own child may in a certain sense 
not be one’s own child at all, may by some 
trick of heredity reproduce the features and 
character traits of some relative whom we 
detest. It is an accident whether we belong 
to one nation or to another, whether we hap- 
pen to be Englishmen, Frenchmen, Ameri- 
cans. It is a matter of chance whether we 
were brought up as Mohammedans, as Bud- 
dhists, as Jews, or as Christians. A dis- 
tinguished statesman once said to me: “Has 
not your reading of history taught you that 
chance rules the affairs of men?” I should 
not be willing to subscribe to this statement 
without qualification, but certainly the role 
of chance in human affairs is commonly 
underrated. And above all, chance is the 
supreme matchmaker, joining together as 
often as not the uncongenial. Strictly speak- 
ing, it would be correct to say always joining 
together those who in some measure are un- 


MARRIAGE 71 


fitted for one another. For in no human pair 
is the man ever absolutely the counterpart of 
the woman and she of him. For as no two 
faces are alike, so no two characters are 
alike. There are ever irreducible idiosyn- 
crasies, and it were indeed a miracle if the 
idiosyncrasies on one side were exactly 
suited to make a harmonious chord with the 
idiosyncrasies on the other. There are 
always at least latent discords, we do not 
naturally fall into tune with one another. 
The Platonic fancy of the two halves of 
the soul uniting is a myth. It is enough for 
“human nature’s daily need” that there be 
some powerful initial attraction, some gen- 
uine fund of congeniality to be augmented 
and perfected as time goes on. Perfect con- 
geniality is to be created, not found; to be 
approximated to, not to be presumed. 

The ethical rule applied to human relations 
is to treat chance relations as if they were 
necessary relations, to transform them into 
necessary relations; to treat a companion 
whom chance has associated with us as if he 


72 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


were indispensable to us in the attainment 
of our supreme end. But the full meaning 
of this will appear later on. 

In this connection a disconcerting counter- 
influence is to be noted, a trick of what 
the Hindus called the great Maya, that 
tendency to illusion which plays such havoc 
in the affairs of men. The illusion is that 
the perfect ideal of the relation of the man 
and the woman can be realised in marriage, 
that nothing short of entire fulfillment is to 
be expected, is to be insisted on. Any pas- 
sionate attachment between persons of op- 
posite sex is apt to be accompanied by this 
illusion. The object of the passion, the in- 
fatuation, is invested with the robe of per- 
fection, worship passes into idolatry. Some- 
times the idolatry is kept up obstinately, 
vitiating the relation by an intrinsic un- 
truth—more frequently disenchantment fol- 
lows. In no other human relation is this 
trick of illusion so strong. No one expects 
as a citizen to live in the perfect state; no 
one engaged in a vocation, however lofty, 


MARRIAGE 73 


expects to see the highest ideal of that voca- 
tion realised, either in himself or in his col- 
leagues. In marriage it seems otherwise. 
And among the causes that lead to the un- 
rest, and the bitter complaints about the 
failure of marriage, is its failure to fulfil the 
seductive dream that haunts the minds of 
those who are uninstructed as to the relation 
of the ideal to the actual. 

3. In marriage and the family two in- 
stincts are operative—the sex instinct and 
the parental instinct. The two are often at 
cross purposes. The sex instinct in its raw 
state tends toward the impermanence of 
the relation, the parental relation tends 
toward permanence. The sex instinct in 
its raw state (without those sublimations 
superinduced by zsthetic and moral cultiva- 
tion), is unstable, capricious, inappeasable, 
restlessly transitive, the substance of insub- 
stantiality, compact of infidelity and change. 
The parental instinct, on the contrary, knits 
together the man and the woman in their 
offspring, indirectly but so firmly as to make 


74, SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


their separation in any case painful. At 
present the parental instinct seems to have 
been weakened in many instances, partly 
owing to the migratory habits of the popu- 
lation, the children quitting the home at an 
early age to shift for themselves, partly ow- 
ing to the erroneous opinion encouraged by 
Socialism that systematic education by scien- 
tific teachers in public institutions is prefer- 
able to unsystematic bringing up by parents 
who yet, whatever else they lack, do supply 
the indispensable element of unique per- 
sonal interest and cherishing affection. At 
any rate the fact that in so many recent 
writings on the subject the ideal of marriage 
is depicted as if it were a relation solely be- 
tween the man and the woman (a sex rela- 
tion), minimising the existence of children, 
treating their existence almost as negligible, 
indicates that in the minds of these writers 
and their following one of the two instincts, 
the sex instinct, predominates over the 
other. Yet one cannot help thinking that this 
state of feeling, after all, must be excep- 


MARRIAGE 70 


tional and temporary, for in any large sur- 
vey of the past one perceives that in human 
beings the parental instinct predominates. 
All that is best in human civilisation has been 
built up on the basis of the long infancy of 
children, and the character traits developed 
in parents by the direct personal dependence 
upon them of their children, and it seems 
likely that in the future, as in the past, this 
ingrained tendency will hold its own. One 
reason why we should desire that it will is 
that the sex relation itself is chiefly dignified 
by its orientation toward the parental. 
4.'The doctrine that the happiness of the 
pair is the sole or the principal object of 
marriage is a novel one. Happiness is a 
thing naturally and universally desired, but 
it is not therefore set up as the chief desid- 
eratum, except at a time when the subjective 
aspect of life eclipses the objective—that is 
to say, when the individual conceives of him- 
self in an abstract way as having rights apart 
from his social connections, and estimates his 
relations to others, and even the services he 


76 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


cannot help rendering them, according to the 
degree of pleasure which he derives from 
such relations and _ services. Marriage 
plainly has an objective side as well as a 
subjective, and the former must predomi- 
nate over the latter. As much happiness as 
is achievable—yes, but not happiness the 
paramount end. Indeed, the most real hap- 
piness, the utmost peace and satisfaction, is 
to be attained only by identifying the 
objective with the subjective purpose. Ask 
not and ye shall receive. Emerson some- 
where has it that the beauty of a sunrise or 
a sunset is most entrancing when it comes 
as a surprise by the way, not when delib- 
erately sought. It is the same with happi- 
ness. The obvious purpose of marriage is to 
perpetuate human life on earth, and not only 
human life but human civilisation—that is, 
the life of human beings as ordered on a 
certain plan, with a view to maintaining cer- 
tain public human interests deemed essential. 
To these public interests the private inter- 


MARRIAGE Fe. 


ests of the married pair have ever in the main 
yielded preference. 

As to what are the genuine public inter- 
ests, however, there have been curious mis- 
judgments due to the imperfect stage of 
social development reached, and entailing 
often great and cruel hardship. The mar- 
riage alliances of royal houses are an ex- 
ample. The so-called “reason of state” 
prevailing, the public interest was identified 
with the territorial aggrandisement of the 
ruling dynasty. The intimate preferences 
and aversions of the princely personages 
were disregarded, the man or the woman 
was sacrificed to the fetish of political 
power. Under the feudal régime landed 
property was the fetish. Human beings were 
regarded in a way as adjuncts to the estate; 
the transmission of the estate unimpaired, 
and if possible enlarged, was regarded as‘the 
public interest to be perpetuated by mar- 
riage. In the artisan corporations, broadly 
speaking, the object of marriage was to re- 
cruit the guild—the son stepping into the 


ais b SPIRITUALVIDEAL 


shoes of the father, and the public interest 
was conceived as maintenance of the voca- 
tional status quo. Society in general at that 
time was unprogressive; civilisation, at least 
in theory, was immobile, and was to be kept 
so; the social order such as it existed was to 
be maintained, and marriage was the instru- 
ment for thus maintaining it. 

The dynastic, the feudal, the guild concep- 
tions of the public interest have now disap- 
peared. The family is no longer regarded as 
the organ designated to fill the ranks of a 
stable society—it is the vestibule that leads 
into a great variety of vocations. The son 
is not any longer expected to follow in the 
footsteps of his parent. The supposedly 
paramount ends of property and the like are 
no longer acknowledged as paramount. In- 
dividualism, on that side of it on which it 
represents the inviolable personality of the 
man or the woman, righteously rebelled 
against human interests being subordinated 
to property interests. Property is a means 
to an end, the end being the development of 


MARRIAGE 79 


personality, and to sacrifice the end to the 
means is preposterous. But the individual 
is only one of the factors to be considéred in 
the ethical relation, the other is the group 
with its interests. And individualism to- 
day raises its head and towers into the 
clouds, because the group ends which have 
been proposed no longer command respect— 
neither the political organisation nor the so- 
cial order as it exists, nor yet the institution 
of marriage, as its meaning is understood. 
And in default of an objective purpose de- 
serving of veneration, it is natural that the 
subjective aspect should be uppermost, and 
that the happiness claim should be exag- 
gverated. 

This, to my way of thinking, accounts for 
the state of things to which we have come; 
and the state of things to which we have 
come is, for the proximate future at least, 
far from reassuring. It is not only the rapid 
progress of the divorce movement in all 
countries that indicates the spread of sub- 
jectivism, it is the fact that many admirable 


80 SPIRITUAL AIDEAL 


people, fine women among the rest, who 
themselves conform to established usages, 
nevertheless entertain and do not hesitate 
to express the opinion that impermanence in 
marriage would be the ideal arrangement. 
It is this fact, I say, that reveals the extent 
to which the foundations have been shaken. 
And let us frankly confess that it is not pos- 
sible successfully to oppose the public in- 
terest to the private, to demand of self- 
respecting human beings that the one should 
simply give way to the other, that the pub- 
lic interest, like some monstrous steam- 
roller, should be allowed to suppress the 
rightful claims of the private soul. Unless 
a way can be found of identifying the two, of 
planting, as it were, the public interest in the 
very heart of the private, of convincingly 
showing that it is the supreme interest of the 
private man or woman to be creative of the 
public interest, no solution will be in sight. 
Such a solution is possible only on the 
spiritual plane, and of this I shall presently 
have to speak. But before offering my own 


MARRIAGE 8I 


suggestions, I must advert briefly to the sac- 
ramental theory of marriage, which at the 
present day is the only one that holds the 
field, at least for those who remain under the 
influence of the Church, as against the wide- 
spread inundation of subjectively individual- 
istic ideas and practices. 

The sacramental theory undertakes to give 
a ground for the permanence of the marriage 
tie. Does it succeed in doing sop? Accord- 
ing to the theory, God is a third partner in 
every marriage solemnised by the priest. 
God unites the pair, and what God has joined 
man may not put asunder. But what good 
reason is there for supposing that God did 
join together any particular pair, more par- 
ticularly when the event proves that they 
were egregiously unfitted, maladjusted, or, 
as the phrase is, incompatible with one 
another. Does God link incompatibles to- 
gether? Should he not be conceived as the 
author of harmony? Yes, if a single married 
pair existed harmonious in an absolute sense 
one might admit that the Deity had united 


82 SPIRTI VALID RAL 


them, adding that this particular pair may 
never be divorced—a superfluous addition, 
however, since, being absolutely harmoni- 
ous, they could not and would not separate. 

But the Church does presuppose the ex- 
istence of incompatibilities, uncongenialities, 
and the real ground on which the Church 
of Rome, at all events, vindicates the indis- 
soluble union is its belief in the miraculous 
efficacy of the sacrament. The sacrament 
is the cement, as it were, which holds to- 
gether what would otherwise split off. St. 
Augustine declares that the sacrament alone, 
as administered by the priest, renders the 
recipients capable of living together perma- 
nently in conjugal fidelity. Conjugal fidel- 
ity, he says, is regarded as a noble ideal even 
by civilised peoples outside the Church, but 
without the magical sacramental touch hu- 
man nature is incapable of living up to such 
an ideal. To the objection that adultery is 
known to occur after marriages celebrated 
by the priest, Augustine replies that the 
grace communicated in the sacrament re- 


MARRIAGE 83 


mains indelible, but that it operates in the 
case of adultery so as to make the rebellion 
of the adulterer against grace a more heinous 
sin, just as in baptism it makes a crime com- 
mitted after baptism a more hideous crime. 
In Ephesians v, we have a more spiritual 
interpretation of marriage, and a more 
spiritual reason given why it should be 
permanent, namely, because the husband has 
a certain work to perform on behalf of his 
wife, which is never complete during their 
finite existence together. The relation be- 
tween the woman and the man is depicted 
as analogous to that between the Church 
and Christ. As Christ is the head of the 
Church, so man is the head of the woman. 
The Church is the body of Christ, his earthly 
members. The analogy implies that the 
wife is to be regarded as the more earthly 
part in the union, it implies the supremacy 
of the man in marriage. Again, the phrase 
that Christ is the head of the Church implies 
that a certain influence proceeds from him 
and penetrates the Church. This influence, 


84 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


as the context shows, is that of overcoming 
the sense nature of the members of the 
Church, of making the Church pure in the 
sense of otherworldly. It follows again, 
per viam analogie, that the work to be done 
by the man on behalf of the woman, the 
spiritual benefit he is to confer on her, is that 
of overcoming the more passionate tenden- 
cies of her nature, of fixing in her mind the 
otherworldly outlook. But this theory of 
marriage involves identifying spirituality 
with otherworldliness, it implies that the 
woman is the more passionate of the two, a 
contention which it would be difficult to sub- 
stantiate, an echo of the Genesis story where 
woman plays the part of the temptress, and 
it represents the spiritual relation as uni- 
lateral, the man exercising the elevating in- 
fluence, the woman being merely the recipi- 
ent of it, while in truth reciprocality of 
influence is of the very essence of the spir- 
itual relation. 

The sacramental theory may still be a 
bulwark of permanent marriage for the 


MARRIAGE 8c 


members of the more orthodox churches, 
but it will hardly serve the purpose for those 
who have been taught to reflect upon the as- 
sumptions of the theory. Nor will the bare 
flat expressed in the dictum ‘“‘What God hath 
joined let no man put asunder” suffice to im- 
press those who, when required to subordi- 
nate their happiness to something higher, 
expect to be furnished with an adequate 
reason for so doing.” 

Let us pause for a moment to consider the 
point which we have reached. The perma- 
nency of marriage is still intrenched in the 
laws and usages of society, and deeper down 
in the parental instinct; but habits may be 
unlearned, and even strong instincts may be- 
come uncertain, unless supported by intel- 
lectual conviction, and a theory of marriage 





2 Perhaps it might be argued that an adequate reason is not 
far to seek, seeing that the desire for happiness in impermanent 
relations is self-defeating. Impermanence itself is one of the 
chief causes of unhappiness, and, moreover, no one has ever 
been able to describe a state of society which would be pleas- 
ing or even tolerable if temporary relations were to become 
the rule. But this would mean to discredit impermanence with- 
out furnishing a reason for permanence—the conclusion might 
then be that neither plan is acceptable, and that there is nothing 
for it but a choice of evils. 


S6 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


justifying the permanence of the relation at 
present is nowhere in sight. The authority 
of the Church as far as it extends is useful as 
a dyke against the flood. It is a restraining 
but not a constructive influence. While if 
we turn to the philosophers, especially the 
philosophical systems of recent times, we 
shall get but scant help from their teachings. 
What has Bergson to say that is helpful in 
solving the marriage problem, or Bertrand 
Russell, or the experimentalists? As for the 
great German philosophers, the two who are 
reputed the most ethical, Kant and Fichte, 
are quite impossible as guides. Kant’s views 
on marriage are pitched on the lowest scale; 
Fichte’s are curiously, ineptly romantic. 
Hegel’s opinions on the social institutions 
are conservative, but one must swallow in- 
tellectual absolutism in order to be content 
with his reasons. 

To know what we lack is the sine gua non 
of progress. ‘There is no ethical theory of 
marriage in existence at present that serves. 
This must be set down plainly, decisively, 


MARRIAGE 87 


with full knowledge of what is implied in the 
statement. By an ethical theory I under- 
stand one that shall respect and even 
heighten the claims of the individual, while 
at the same time proposing a supereminent 
end to which the private happiness may and 
should be subordinated. 

The issue lies between the ideals of perma- 
nence and impermanence. ‘We are bound to 
decide which of these two ideals we sanction. 
Permanence becomes peremptory if a truly 
objective end can be proposed which the 
individual will recognise as superior to his 
private ends, which he will embrace as being 
indeed his own dearest end, in the pursuit of 
which his existence becomes worth while in 
his own eyes. An objective end is one that 
stands on its own feet. An objective end is 
like a beautiful work of art that has a value 
of its own independent of the subjective 
state of the individual who created it, of the 
pleasure he experiences or the pain he suf- 
fers in making it. It has a certain external- 
Pomeapacerirom its ‘creator; anda yet. 1s 


88 . SPIRDRUAGAED Bie 


intimately connected with him, for it ex- 
presses a trans-subjective value which he is 
capable of conceiving and to a certain extent 
embodying. No human action can be with- 
out a motive; the motive in this case is 
obedience to the impulsion from within, and 
the satisfaction is found in giving free course 
to the inner constraint, despite the distress or 
even the anguish by which it may be ac- 
companied, and despite the incompleteness 
of the result. Or, to put it more positively, 
the objective end, and with it the permanence 
of marriage, will appeal in the long run to 
those in whom activity is predominant—they 
are, in my use of the word, the ethically- 
minded; while impermanence will be fav- 
oured by those in whom recipiency is pre- 
dominant, who reflect in all their relations 
and all their exertions upon the quota of 
pleasure which they may derive therefrom. 

To live in activity as such directed toward 
a worth-while object—the worth-whileness 
of the object radiating into the activity, even 
when the object is not attained—is one state 


MARRIAGE 89 


of mind; to treasure the pleasantness of one’s 
own feelings is a different state of mind. 
Turning now to the arguments adduced 
by the advocates of impermanence, we find 
that we have to deal, firstly, with their con- 
ception of freedom; secondly, with the mean- 
ing they attach to self-expression; and, 
thirdly, with their dictum that where love 
ceases marriage should cease. I referred in 
the beginning to the young married woman 
who sought a divorce because she could not 
endure a binding tie, and to Brandes’s exas- 
peration as attributable to the same cause. 
Freedom in these instances means the ab- 
sence of binding ties, of constraint in any 
form. To indicate briefly my own stand- 
point, I will lay down that binding ties are 
welcome in so far as they are necessary to un- 
bind what ts highest in us. Those binding 
ties which do not serve this purpose, like 
restrictions on the freedom of conscience, the 
freedom of speech and the like, are censur- 
able, and social progress largely consists in 
undoing them. The other kind of binding 


bo) TSPIRT DUAR IDEAL 


ties are to be affirmed, and social progress 
largely consists in making them more bind- 
ing, or one might say automatically effec- 
tual. Positive freedom is an expression of 
the essential self in us; the question is 
whether the tie, which permanently binds 
one man to one woman, is indispensable to 
freedom thus conceived. The issue is be- 
tween wild freedom, neurotic freedom, and 
positive freedom. 

Next, as to self-expression. I hope it will 
not seem too pedantic if I distinguish three 
aspects of the self,—not, of course, three 
selves, but three aspects of the self—the 
lower, the higher, and the highest, and predi- 
cate as corresponding to them the minor 
ends of a human being, the major ends, and 
the maximum end. As to the minor ends, 
the animal ends, those which, broadly speak- 
ing, we share with the inferior creatures, no 
one, I imagine, will deny that in case of col- 
lision they should give way to the higher 
ends. To advocate impermanence in the sex 
relation for the sake of a more varied gratifi- 


MARRIAGE QI 


cation of the sex instinct would be to reduce 
man to the animal level, since in a life thus 
lived, a disorderly, dissipated life, the mind, 
being uneasily set on sense gratification, the 
higher faculties, those of the thinker, the 
artist, the man of affairs, would stand no 
chance; the lower, groveling purposes 
would fill the horizon, the things that count 
from the human point of view would be out 
of the picture. Moreover, the general men- 
tal instability that goes with such an ex- 
istence is unfavourable to that concentra- 
tion which is so essential to any valid 
achievement in art or science or business. 
The unbinding of the animal instincts blocks 
the way to the exercise of the higher facul- 
ties. The binding of the lower is necessary 
in order that the higher may act. This, at 
least, is indisputably a condition of freedom, 
and it is proper that a certain coercion in 
this particular be exercised by society—that 
laws, for instance, against crime be enacted, 
laws which the more developed human be- 
ings voluntarily consent to and are never 


92 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


even tempted to infract, but which are use- 
ful and necessary to restrain the weaker 
brethren. 

But the position for which I specially con- 
tend is that not only the lower should give 
way to the higher interests, but that the 
higher, the major ends, should give way to 
the highest, the maximum end, in case of 
collision; and this is the pivot on which, in 
the last analysis, the issue between imperma- 
nence and permanence turns. This is the 
point where the harmful ambiguity of what 
is called the right to self-expression has to be 
exposed. 

The right of self-expression, as commonly 
understood, implies untrammeled oppor- 
tunity for the development of one’s talents 
and tastes, of one’s intellectual and zsthetic 
—that is, of one’s higher—faculties, of those 
that subserve the major ends of life. But 
the major ends must yield precedence to the 
maximum end, the maximum end being the 
affirmation, not of the one or the other par- 
tial aspect of the self (the intellectual or 


MARRIAGE 93 


zesthetic), but of the self as a whole, of the 
unique personality as postulated in others 
and in oneself. And this involves respect 
for the unique personality of others, and as 
a corollary the preservation of others so far 
as they depend on us for the sake of their 
unique personality. An instance in point is 
the action of a youth who was offered the 
chance of a university education, and who 
made what for him was the grand refusal, 
because his aged parents were dependent on 
him for support, and there was no one else 
to take his place. He sacrificed his intel- 
lectual ambitions, perfectly legitimate as 
they would have been in other circumstances. 
He sacrificed a major end for the sake of the 
maximum end, he sacrificed his higher self, 
so to speak, in order to express his highest 
self, and such self-expression has the char- 
acter of sublimity. 

The same applies to mothers in relation to 
their children. No one nowadays questions 
the right of a woman to follow any vocation 
to which she is inclined, and for which she 


94 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


believes herself fit. Astronomy, chemistry, 
among the sciences, law, music, literature, 
the banking business, are a few of the walks 
of life in which women have essayed their 
power. No one questions their right to go 
as far as they possibly can. But neither for 
women nor men is it possible to follow two 
vocations at the same time. For every real 
vocation is exigent, and is becoming more 
and more so. It is desirable to have an avo- 
cation alongside of the vocation, but it is not 
practicable to have two vocations, to serve 
two masters. Goethe tried it and failed, and 
he condensed his experience, toward the 
latter part of his life, in the words: ‘Work 
and renounce” (Entsagen sollst du, sollst ent- 
sagen); work assiduously in thine own line, 
and try to develop thy talents and tastes in 
other directions only to the extent that is 
consistent with the most efficient perform- 
ance of thine own task. Now motherhood 
is, or at least in the way of becoming, a true 
vocation. It draws upon various sciences— 
on chemistry, physiology, on psychology, on 


MARRIAGE 9s 


the applied arts, on applied ethics, the theory 
of punishment for instance—and besides, 
since the family is the foundation of the 
State, and the right ordering of the State 
reacts upon the family, the wiser mother- 
hood implies active participation in public 
life. The mother is no longer restricted, or 
supposed to be restricted, within the four 
walls of her house, but her interests and ac- 
tivities are nevertheless vocationally focal- 
ized upon the life problems of the members 
of the group which centres in her as the 
mother. The single woman may choose any 
profession she pleases, but a married woman 
has her profession cut out for her. She may 
continue to have her avocation alongside, 
her music for instance, but if she have chil- 
dren she can hardly expect to be a profes- 
sional musician, unless indeed she is willing 
to delegate the care of her children to paid 
assistants. A married woman therefore may 
have to sacrifice the higher interests of in- 
tellectual and esthetic development, to fore- 
go the development of certain talents and 


96 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


tastes in order to revere the maximum end, 
which is regard for the personality of those 
who depend on her. The question, here as 
elsewhere where self-expression is raised as 
an issue, is which of your selves do you de- 
sire to express, the higher or the highest? 

But how do we stand toward the dictum 
that love alone consecrates the sex life? As 
against mercenary marriages, the mariage de 
convenance, marriage for wealth or title or 
the like, it is obviously valid. I have said 
above that absolute congeniality is a dream, 
but a certain fund of congeniality, a certain 
intimate attraction there ought to be to war- 
rant the hope of augmenting and perfecting 
it later on. But before we agree to the in- 
ference that where love ceases marriage 
should cease, had we not better pause to in- 
quire in what sense the word “love” is used. 
It cannot mean the passion of the libertine, 
for in that case why speak of marriage? II- 
licit relations are avowedly temporary. The 
understanding on either side is that there 
shall be no responsibility, and therefore no 


MARRIAGE 97 


permanence. It is just the absence of re- 
sponsibility that appeals to the lovers of the 
wild freedom. It cannot surely mean that 
marriage is to cease when the physical 
charms of the woman diminish, a change 
which often takes place after childbirth, just 
at the time when the fact of responsibility 
stands out most unmistakably. If that were 
the meaning, then marriage would be a mere 
cloak for promiscuity. But the plea that 
marriage should cease when love ceases is 
put forward by finer natures, and in their 
case it is based on an esthetic ideal of life. 
Let me here introduce a word as to the 
difference between the esthetic and the ethi- 
cal point of view. The esthetic tempera- 
ment is distinguished from the ethical in 
that it seeks to enjoy perfection here and 
now, while the latter endeavours to create 
perfection, and is willing to suffer the pain 
‘of imperfection while engaged in the effort 
Oivereation,)) hor as*much) asva persons 
what I have called ethical minded, it does not 
follow that he is insensitive to beauty, to the 


98 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


harmonies of sound, colour, line, etc., 
achieved by art. He will delight in them as 
recreations of the spirit, as stimulations for 
his proper task, as foreshadowings of those 
harmonies which the ethical ideal requires 
that he seek to actualise in human lives. 
The zsthetically-minded person feeds on the 
perfections of art, reposes on them as finali- 
ties, and when, leaving the domain of pure 
art, he faces the problem of associating with 
his fellow beings, who are not as ductile to 
the artistic touch as sounds and colours and 
lines, he refuses to take his share in the slow 
process of transforming human nature, and 
invents instead an illusory art of living on 
the plan of selecting for companionship 
those natures which are or seem to be already 
congruous with his own, and in whose so- 
ciety he hopes to enjoy even now the per- 
fect harmony. Enjoyment of perfection on 
the one hand, working for the creation of 
perfection on the other, is the distinction. 
As applied to the relation of men and 
women in marriage the esthetic ideal may 


MARRIAGE 99 


be defined as the ideal of mutual comple- 
mentation, deficiency on one side to be 
rounded out by quality on the other; in- 
sights, intuitions, delicacies on the one side 
to be compensated by stronger intellectual 
outreachings, volitional persistences, etc., 
on the other, the two natures thus falling 
naturally and increasingly into tune, and 
each experiencing the more complete expres- 
sion of the individual self in consequence of 
the action upon it of the other self. Where, 
however, a mistake was made in the choice, 
where the partner fails to come up to ex- 
pectations, where incompatibilities, at first 
unnoticed, appear after marriage—and it is 
precisely these incompatibilities that appear 
after marriage which constitute the real 
problem—then from the zsthetic point of 
view, and in the name of love, the marriage is 
to be dissolved, and the ideal partner sought 
elsewhere—a wild-goose chase if ever there 
was one. 

From the ethical standpoint, the notion of 
mutual complementation as thus put for- 


100 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


ward must be strenuously combated. Just 
because it is so fine, so fascinating, and yet 
does not ring true, the falseness in it, the 
perils which it harbors, must be shown up. 
A certain objective end is to be pursued by 
the married partners greater and more 
worth while than the finest mutually ego- 
tistic satisfactions. My thesis is that even 
in the most fortunate marriages a residue of 
incompatibility remains; nay, I go so far as 
to say that as individuation proceeds, idio- 
syncrasies will develop more intimate and 
difficult to match. My thesis further is, that 
wherever there is friction the conflict of im- 
pulses and desires can only be overcome by 
pointing to some overarching supereminent 
end, some commanding purpose which the 
persons concerned alike recognise, effecting 
unity through cooperation in the effort to 
accomplish that purpose. This holds good 
in regard to the friction between the social 
groups, in regard to the conflicts of nations, 
in regard to the incompatibilities that ap- 
pear in marriage. There must be some over- 


MARRIAGE IOI 


arching end in view clearly discerned; the 
absence of such an end from the minds of 
men is the radical ethical weakness of our 
age. Cooperation, then, not complementa- 
tion! Complementation, at least as the idea 
is understood, is a compact for the exchange 
of egotisms. I can best gratify my selfish 
purpose by ministering to yours, and you in 
turn by ministering to mine. The selfish 
purpose in the case considered is the expres- 
sion of the higher self, not of the highest. 
When we look at the highest we find that 
the satisfaction which it craves, no longer 
subjective, consists, as has been said, in the 
production of an independent good which 
has indubitable significance in the nature of 
things, aside from the pleasures and pains of 
the beings that are engaged in producing it. 
And cooperation in the effort which is sub- 
servient to that end is the keynote of con- 
jugal love in its purest, most spiritual aspect. 
We love the person who is most precious to 
us in the sense of making our life most ad- 
mirable, in securing self-respect on the 


102 SPIRDPIO AES ay 


loftiest terms. As fathers or mothers there 
is only one person in the world who is in- 
dispensable to us in this way, and this is the 
woman or the man with whom we are as- 
sociated in marriage; for as fathers and 
mothers the attainment of our highest self- 
respect depends on our relation to the child, 
and as there is only one person associated 
with us in giving life to the child, there is no 
other upon whom we can count to render us 
this supreme service. 

But let me define more exactly the over- 
arching end to which marriage is devoted, 
the task which the man and the woman are 
to fulfil jointly. Marriage is the organ for 
the perpetuation of the spiritual life, which, 
so far as we know, appears in the finite 
world only in human beings. The spiritual 
life is a feeble flame that needs to be con- 
tinuously replenished, and the vehicles of it, 
men and women, how frail are they, and how 
brief is their hold on existence! The trees of 
the forest survive us, the rocks outlast us 
by millenniums. If it were not for repro- 


MARRIAGE 103 


duction, this human race of torchbearers 
would become extinct, and with it the flame 
of which it is the bearer. Every married 
pair undertakes to fulfil on its part the task 
of humanity. This is the obligation which 
all who enter into the marriage relation 
should have before their minds. But the 
task is not only to perpetuate the spiritual 
life, but to enhance it—that is, to extend the 
reign of spirit on earth, to heighten its qual- 
ity, to produce in human relations an image 
of “the Kingdom of Heaven’’—that is, to 
transfigure as far as may be the natural re- 
lations between human beings into spiritual 
relations. Now the spiritual relation itself 
is nothing else than an ideally organic rela- 
tion, one 1n which the organic idea, whereof 
we have no adequate example whatever, 
either in the animal or the human world, is 
conceived as perfectly realised—that is to 
say, a relation of distinctively differentiated 
functions so interacting that each in its ex- 
ercise promotes the absolutely efficient exer- 
cise of the rest, with which it is systemati- 


104 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


cially co-related. The conclusion is that 
marriage is spiritualised when each of the 
two sexes so acts as to draw out the dis- 
tinctive sex quality of the other in respect to 
mind and character, and in so doing achieves 
its own—that is to say, when the essential 
womanliness of the one elicits the essential 
manliness of the other, and conversely, each 
in so doing becoming possessed of its own 
essential and distinctive quality. The for- 
mula of the spiritual relation is: So act as 
to elicit the best in others, in the process 
eliciting the best that is potential in thyself. 

As to what is this essential womanliness, 
this essential manliness, there may be differ- 
ent opinions. The psycho-physical nature 
with which we are endowed is the basis on 
which the spiritual is to be superinduced, and 
our knowledge of the psychology of sex is 
still in its infancy. But perhaps I may be 
permitted to suggest the following: The 
peculiar gift of woman, it seems to me, is to 
see life as a whole—hers is, as it were, the 
assembling function; the peculiar gift of man 


MARRIAGE 108 


is specialisation, the exercise of energy along 
specific lines. The whole which the woman 
sees is not indeed the whole of life; it may be, 
and generally is, only a section of life, often 
a narrowly circumscribed section—her social 
set, a certain parochial environment, a 
church fellowship—but that which she sees 
she is apt to see together, as a whole. The 
influence of man should be to enlarge her 
world view more and more, to widen her 
horizon; and ideally the influence of woman 
upon man as he enters into the complexities 
of life, should be to help him to systematize 
the relations in which he finds himself, to 
order his purposes on a synoptic plan, to har- 
monize all his relations—to herself, to the 
children, if there be children, to the members 
of his vocation, his fellow workers, to the 
State of which he is a citizen, to humanity, 
to the universe. Ideally, and I am here 
speaking of supreme ideals, the woman re- 
presents the total world spirit, she is “the 
Eternal Womanly that leads man upward 
and onward,” she is the solar, centralising 


106 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


influence, she is the Woman clothed with 
the Sun, she is Beatrice standing on the 
heights of heaven surveying the infinite 
scheme of things, and with the smile which 
radiates the beauty of her being contenting 
man with his place. 

Some measure of such influence the two 
sexes may exert upon each other in their 
friendships, and more deeply in childless 
marriages; but it is the responsibility for the 
child, their common offspring, that most ef- 
fectively calls out the interaction between 
them, inciting them to win the greatest pos- 
sible spiritual profit out of their intercourse 
with one another—in order that on their 
part they may fulfil the task of mankind, 
which is to enhance the spiritual life of the 
next generation by planting the seed of 
spirit in their own child which, so far as they 
are concerned, stands for future humanity. 
The child is the seal of the marriage com- 
pact. The responsibility to the child is the 
incentive that should incessantly draw out 
all that is best in either, in order that they 


MARRIAGE 107 


may transmit that best for prospective in- 
crease to their successors in life. 

Those who believe that a theory of mar- 
riage can be constructed without reference 
to the child ignore the peculiar good which 
it is the prerogative of parents to bestow 
upon children, and the peculiar ethical re- 
action which they get in return. A word as 
to this. In all our dealings with our fellow- 
men the ethical view requires that we at- 
tribute to them a certain potential worth- 
whileness, apart from any actual value which 
they may have, and even in despite of their 
being actually nuisances and impediments to 
progress. The ethical view requires us to 
consider no fellow man as hopeless. It in- 
sists always on the potential in defiance of 
the actual. It is this that forbids us to ex- 
terminate even degenerates or hardened 
criminals; it is this that led Jesus to find dis- 
ciples among harlots and tools of the Roman 
system of extortion (the publicans). Hu- 
manity has worth apart from value, worth 
being the potential quality. Now parents— 


108 SPIRIEU AT TDA 


the mother especially, but the father also 
more indirectly—instinctively hold the child 
unspeakably worth while, in advance ot any 
value which it could possibly claim, in ad- 
vance of any deserving on its part. To the 
child this being held so precious at the out- 
set of life gives a sense of security, a sense 
of being at home somewhere in the world. 
It affords a kind of anchorage to which to 
attach its moral personality; while for those 
parents at least who transcend their instinc- 
tive impulses, the feeling they have for the 
child is a support for their ethical attitude 
toward human beings in general. Never 
can the goodwill of trained teachers in a 
public institution, or the fraternity feeling 
upon which Socialism relies, take the place 
of this preferential relation of parents and 
children and the ethical experience into 
which it may be developed. 

Concentration, I remarked above, is in- 
dispensable to the thorough performance of 
any great task—in science, in the arts, in af- 
fairs; it is certainly no less indispensable in 


MARRIAGE 109 


the sublime task of searching out the essen- 
tial personality of a woman, the essential 
personality of a man, of penetrating to the 
roots of the other’s self, of gripping the 
uniqueness that so hides itself, though it is 
there, at least the idea of it—of bringing it 
to the surface, of making it an effectual idée 
force. Concentration, therefore, on one 
woman or on one man, in other words per- 
manence in the marriage relation, is the spir- 
itual sine qua non. This searching for the 
hidden, divine thing by each in the other, 
with the assurance that though elusive it 
exists, this yearning toward it, this fore- 
knowledge that the complete union between 
the two souls can only be achieved at the 
summit of the nature of each—this, to my 
mind, is love, as it is known at its truest. 
And because the search, in the nature of the 
case, is perpetual, therefore the union must 
be perpetual. And we may say to those who 
insist that when love ceases marriage should 
cease: You are right, friends, only that 
what you say is a truism, for it is in the na- 


110 SPIRITS yy ats 


ture of the thing that properly appropriates 
the world love that it shall never cease. The 
circumstances that it cannot cease is the 
very test and touchstone by which it may be 
distinguished from its fair or foul sem- 
blances. 

I have set out in this book to apply 
a certain spiritual ideal to the vital prob- 
lems of modern life, of which marriage is 
one. But I shall now be told that I have 
traveled too far away from the actual facts, 
and that the ideal is too airy to be appli- 
cable. Take the case, for instance, of a su- 
perior man who finds himself tied for life 
to a frivolous woman, a woman of inferior 
mental capacity, who is dull to all the things 
that really interest him—can there be spirit- 
ual companionship between these two? And 
will not the man, supposing that he is cour- 
ageous enough to disregard the restraints 
of convention, consider himself justified in 
putting an end to the relation? The case 
may easily be reversed, the woman being 
the superior, but to avoid circumlocution 


MARRIAGE III 


let me adhere to the first way of putting it. 
Or even suppose that the two parties start 
on a fairly equal level, but that the one de- 
velops more rapidly than the other, and out- 
distances the other. Referring to what was 
said above as to the difference between the 
higher and the highest levels, my reply is 
that on the higher level, companionship may 
not be possible, but that on the highest, 
Piemspiritualy level; vit) is;)e Hore spiritual 
companionship is a relation of personal- 
ities as a whole, and in the sex relation it is 
not just the intellect of the man that is to be 
mated with the intellect of the woman, but 
the integral man to the integral woman. And 
while this relation does require the devel- 
opment of personality on either side (the 
manifestation of worth in terms of value), 
nevertheless it implies fundamentally, and 
before all and above all, respect for person- 
eiity wand the. discarding lotpeither by athe 
other is contrary to such respect. 

Moreover, the superior man, of whom we 
are speaking, if he go into the matter search- 


112 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


ingly enough, may have a remarkable ex- 
perience. He may, for example, find the 
tables turned against himself, he may be 
startled into inquiring as he never did be- 
fore into the motives with which he married 
this woman. Was it because she was good- 
looking, or had certain pleasing ways, or in 
the expectation of comfort and caresses, or 
because it flattered his vanity to see her pre- 
side over the hospitalities of his house? He 
may be asking whether he himself ever had 
any really spiritual ideal of marriage, any 
just conception of the office which a wife 
might fulfil for her husband, and whether 
he on his part had ever attempted to render 
the correlative office, and if not, whether it 
was to be wondered at that the relation 
should become mean or unbearably common- 
place. And then I imagine that our friend 
the superior man may make a somewhat 
humbler estimate of his superiority, may see 
a vision of the possibilities of the marriage 
relation such as had never dawned on him, 
and this vision will undoubtedly change his 


MARRIAGE 113 


conduct, producing on his side a new attitude 
toward the wife which possibly may meet 
with a response. For not infrequently we 
find that people with whom we habitually 
associate show to strangers a certain fineness 
in their nature which we never see, because 
we have never called it out, because we have 
been too prcipitate in judging what may or 
may not be expected of them. But if there 
be no response, the vision itself and the chal- 
lenge of it, the spiritual growth which it in- 
duces, will be a compensation and consola- 
tion for what might otherwise have been 
sheer martyrdom. 

The so-called conservative is one who ad- 
vocates the status quo in regard to the mar- 
riage institution. J am not to be ranged on 
that side. I believe in conserving the good 
in those institutions which have been trans- 
mitted to us by our forbears, but believe also 
that the good can only be preserved by trans- 
forming it into the better. The good in 
marriage is the permanence of it, the unity 
of the two wills. But this unity of two has 


114 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


often been achieved by the suppression of 
one. Unity is indispensable for the advan- 
tage of all concerned, especially for the chil- 
dren, but it must come by consent, and that, 
as has been shown, can only be achieved by 
directing both wills toward an objective, 
overarching end. The right of woman to 
the most complete mental development pos- 
sible, which was refused in the past, must 
be insisted on, not only in the interests of 
woman but of society in general. The out- 
rageous double standard, already rejected in 
theory, must give way in practice. 

There are many other evils that need to 
be corrected; for instance, the hasty mar- 
riages of young people who drift or rush 
into a relation of whose responsibilities they 
have not the slightest conception. These 
should be prevented by law and education. 
The indictment framed against what Nor- 
dau petulantly called the “marriage lie,” 
against bourgeois morality and the institu- 
tion of marriage as a part of it, is also in 
many respects true. The comfortable mid- 


MARRIAGE IIs 


dle class extol the family as the foundation 
of all the virtues, and yet they take no ef- 
fective measures to abolish the slums in 
which the primary conditions of a decent 
family life are lacking. Bourgeois moral- 
ity extols the chastity of woman, while the 
low pay of female wage-earners puts temp- 
tation in their way, not indeed irresistible 
temptation, as is sometimes extravagantly 
stated, yet often difficult to resist. More- 
over, the cities reek with the social evil, and 
infidelities and brutalities in marriage are 
not infrequent, of which women are physi- 
cally and morally the victims. Such evils as 
these are not to be extenuated by the defend- 
ers of marriage. They are in part the result 
of the present economic system, with which, 
however, the permanence of marriage is not 
bound up, in part the result of dark forces 
in human nature—appetites, ugly passions, 
streaks of primitive ferdcity—with which 
every ideal has to contend. In any case, im- 
permanence in marriage would not remedy 
these evils, but exacerbate them, and if it 


116 SPIRGEISA Tego As 


were adopted women in particular would be 
the greatest sufferers. 

Also it should be said that there is another 
side to the picture. The increase of divorce 
is a grave symptom; but if the law were 
changed to permit the dissolution of mar- 
riage at will it is probable that the greater 
number of married couples would refuse to 
avail themselves of it—the parental instinct 
may be relied on to that extent. And again 
if there be no absolutely perfect marriages, 
there are many in which a degree of ethical 
development as well as of happiness is at- 
tained that is to be met with in no other 
human relationship. The common life in- 
genders common sympathy. A man must 
be very near the level of the brute who does 
not feel a certain awe, and gratitude mingled 
with humility, toward the woman who, ina 
kind of crucifixion, gives birth to their first 
child. The solidarity of husband and wife 
toward the outside world tends to unite 
them. Sorrow, as at the grave of a beloved 
child, grief, as over an unfilial son or daugh- 


MARRIAGE 117 


ter, draws the tie closer, and makes it sacred. 
And the common experiences tend to pro- 
mote not only sympathy, but mutual under- 
standing, the ability to enter into the state of 
mind of the other, to live in the life of the 
other. For the sorrow of a mother, for in- 
stance, in the case of an unfilial son or daugh- 
ter, is unlike that of the father. The man 
may be more hurt in his pride, the woman 
wounded in a deeper, more elemental feel- 
ing. Add to this that close companionship 
has at least the ethical advantage of counter- 
balancing egocentrism. Single men and 
single women, when living an independent 
life, are apt to be more or less shut up in the 
circle of their own ends, their thoughts are 
more apt to revolve about the self. In mar- 
riage and the family the centre of gravity 
is more apt to be transferred from the self to 
the others, thereby counteracting extreme 
individualism, producing, it may be, only an 
enlarged selfishness, which, however, is 
likely under the influences just mentioned to 
turn into something better. 


118 SPIRITUAL iD i Als 


As to extreme cases, divorce is, and in 
view of the present state of public opinion 
must still be, the legal remedy; separation, 
but without remarriage, is the ethical coun- 
sel of perfection. But whatever the legisla- 
tion on the subject of divorce may be, or 
whatever changes may be effected in it, the 
object should be to strengthen, not to 
weaken, the presumption of permanence. 
To admit incompatibility as a cause would 
be to multiply incompatibilities, to encour- 
age the self-seeking man or woman to re- 
gard every difference as intolerable; while 
to grant divorce, as has happened recently, 
a second, third, or even a fifth time, is scan- 
dalous. 

The outcome of the discussion may be 
summarised in the following statements: 

1. The interests of the child—that is, the 
spiritual interests of future humanity—must 
be raised to prominence in the theory of 
marriage as against the prominence at pres- 
ent unduly accorded to the happiness of the 


MARRIAGE 119 


man and the woman—the objective end must 
prevail over the subjective. 

2. Binding ties are to be welcomed in so 
far as they unbind in man the higher and 
the highest. 

3. Even the higher itself must be subor- 
dinated to the highest, the major ends to the 
maximum end in case of collision. 

4. It is true that marriage should cease 
when love ceases. But it is in the nature of 
that love which deserves the name not to 
cease. We love that which is lovable. That 
which is most lovable is the secret beauty in 
another’s nature. Love is the feeling evoked 
by anticipation of union with that beauty. 
It constantly recreates itself and is intensi1- 
fied even while thwarted. It is a longing an- 
ticipating its satisfaction; it is the constant 
unwillingness to be separated from the ob- 
ject of its quest. 


IV 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 


WO systems are mainly in view at pres- 
ent—capitalism on the one hand and 
socialism of various kinds on the other. 
We are here concerned, not with systems or 
schemes, but with principles. I shall there- 
fore briefly consider the principles underly- 
ing capitalism and socialism, and then call 
attention to a third principle, the organic or 
spiritual.’ 
A powerful motive underlies capitalism, 
that of individualistic self-satisfaction and 





1In popular debate the issue has unfortunately been nar- 
rowed down to this single pair of alternatives. Either one is 
a defender of capitalism or a socialist of some sort, one or the 
other. To criticise socialism is to publish oneself an advo- 
cate of the present competitive system. To censure that 
system is to be numbered with the socialists. That there is a 
third position possible, differing in principle from either, does 
not seem to have dawned upon the public mind—I say 
differing in principle, and thereby distinguished from oppor- 
tunism or the via media method which is guided by no prin- 
ciple whatever, but by what is rightly. or wrongly, often 
wrongly, supposed to be practical convenience. 

I20 


SOCIALC RECONSTRUCTION = 121 


self-affrmation as expressed in the phrase 
la carriere ouverte aux talents—with some- 
thing lke contempt for the less talented; 
or, again, the race to the strongest and 
swiftest, with but little heed to those who 
may be trodden under foot. And this motive 
is properly designated as materialistic, since 
the aim and object is the accumulation of 
material wealth, together with such social 
and political influence as the possession of 
riches secures. The so-called harmony of 
interests, the argument that the unflinching 
egotism of each individual will somehow 
prove to be advantageous to all the rest, that 
the base metal in the economic crucible will 
somehow be transmuted into gold, is a mere 
afterthought—what would nowadays be 
called the rationalization of an unacknowl- 
edged craving, a craving so strong and ne- 
farious that human nature shrinks from 
blankly confessing it. And a like ration- 
alization is the argument that the prospect 
of unbounded wealth, first of thousands of 
dollars, then of millions, finally of multimil- 


122 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


lions, is the only magnet capable of drawing 
out the latent capabilities of inventors, ex- 
ecutives, initiators of great enterprises; the 
argument that unless the lion’s share of 
material goods falls to the few, the many 
will not even have a modicum of such goods, 
that unless Dives feasts, Lazarus will not 
even be able to pick up crumbs. 

The economist may reprimand us at this 
point for underestimating the merits of the 
capitalistic system in the past, its historical 
significance as the successor of the feudal 
organization of society, the value which may 
still belong to it, and the practical diffi- 
culty of replacing it. All this is very perti- 
nent from the economist’s point of view, 
but it does not in the least touch the ques- 
tion with which we, looking to the future, 
are here dealing: whether the motive that 
keeps the capitalistic system going is hon- 
orable to men or not, whether it is the kind 
of motive which, stripped of its rationaliza- 
tions, can be satisfying even to those who 
are prompted by it. We may indeed be told 


SUCTAR REGONS TRUGIION var23 


by way of reply that human nature being 
such as it is, no better motive could be found 
to work. That may be so, or may not be so. 
At any rate it is a prejudgment, a belief 
founded on the way men behave under the 
existing system, which itself discourages 
better motives where they exist, and cannot 
therefore be taken to exclude the possibility 
that, given the proper kind of education, a 
more creditable system may become feasible. 

The motive underlying socialism is like- 
wise individualistic. Socialism is universal- 
ized individualism, individualism carried to 
its extreme boundaries. It differs, however, 
from the preceding system in two vital par- 
ticulars. The happy career is to be open, 
not only to the talented, but to the untal- 
- ented, the unskilled or the little skilled. All 
individuals are to be the recipients of bene- 
fit, and consequently the independent efforts 
of the stronger and more gifted are to be 
restrained and regulated by collective action. 
Under the competitive system every one 
hunts on his own account; under socialism 


124 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


the whole mass works for each member of it. 
In either scheme the individual is the ob- 
ject aimed at. In the one scheme some in- 
dividuals, but not all, in the other scheme 
all individuals. In the one scheme the well- 
being of the individual depends solely on his 
own exertions, in the other scheme it is se- 
cured by combination and reglementation. 
Again, in either scheme the individual is 
considered solely and simply as a product of 
nature, without regard to the spiritual part 
of him. Marxist socialism is hostile to re- 
ligion; the other, the competitive system, is 
as such indifferent to religion, leaves religion 
out in the cold—at any rate, in the competi- 
tive system, there is not the slightest trace 
of the influence of spiritual ideas. Wealth 
is defined exclusively in terms of man’s 
natural wants and their satisfaction, and the 
heavy emphasis in the debate between the 
two systems falls on the distribution of 
wealth, whether the few shall have a prefer- 
ential lien on the products of human labor, 


HOCLALIREGCONS PRUGPION res 


or whether the product should as far as pos- 
sible go in equal shares to all. 

It seems to me that a similar motive works 
in the competitive system and in socialism, 
at least in “scientific socialism.” Both are 
individualistic and naturalistic, though the 
latter is inclusive of all individuals. 

But does not the greatest possible dis- 
similarity appear in the exclusiveness on the 
one side and the inclusiveness on the other 
side? To say that all men are to have an 
equal share, does not that imply a pro- 
found moral impulse? And a moral im- 
pulse implies the conscious or unconscious 
acknowledgment of man as having spirit- 
ual needs, as well as natural wants, above 
all as having a personality not to be 
violated. Among many who call themselves 
socialists, no doubt the moral impulse is the 
decisive one, but “scientific socialism” ridi- 
cules their idealogies, allows for no excur- 
sions beyond the domain of the palpable. 
And it is scientific socialism that more than 
any other kind has captured the working 


126 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


classes; and of all the different variants of 
socialism it is still by far the most influential. 
On what ground then does it rest the claim 
that all individuals should be included? Ob- 
viously on the ground that they want to be, 
that they want material satisfactions; or, 
if they are servile enough not effectively to 
want them, that they can be stirred up to 
want them. ‘To talk of rights is pure ideol- 
ogy. “Right” is a moral term. Rights as 
such do not count—force counts. The large 
masses of workers collected in modern in- 
dustrial plants possess force. Let them be 
taught to use it. Hence the importance at- 
tached to the class war, force on the one 
side being pitted against force on the other. 
On the one side Nietzsche will raise the cry: 
Whip the dogs back to their kennels; on the 
other side the cry is: Expropriate the expro- 
priators! 

The method of distributing the product is 
the outstanding issue in the struggle of the 
social classes as waged to-day, though of 
course the augmentation of the product is 


SHETAT RECONSTRUGILO NY 127 


also considered as being necessary to such 
distribution as will furnish material satisfac- 
tion for all. What the man will do with the 
wealth allotted to him is to be left pretty 
much to his own predilections. The satisfac- 
tions desired are of course not merely animal. 
I have said ‘natural,’ I have not said ‘animal’ 
wants. Among the natural wants are also 
the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity and 
the desire for the pleasures of taste. The 
spiritual needs are different. These are left 
out of account in the schemes of social recon- 
struction. On them we shall presently con- 
centrate our attention. 

In the dictum that all individuals shall 
be included we agree with the socialists. In 
the position that the spiritual need of all 
individuals shall be placed in the foreground 
we differ from them. The spiritual need in- 
volves for one thing that any proposed plan 
of social betterment shall be judged in the 
first instance by the effect it is likely to have 
on the producer himself, not by its effect in 
the better distribution of the product. The 


128 SPIRTEWAL Dr As 


producer is our main concern, the improve- 
ment of human nature, the evolution of man 
toward a nobler type, not the multiplica- 
tion of his creature comforts and enjoy- 
ments. If the equitable distribution of the 
product be indispensable to the improve- 
ment of the producer, as it is, then it will 
come as a means to an end; but then the mul- 
tiplication of the product will not be itself 
exalted as the end.° 

The touchstone of any system of social 


3J] am here dealing with what may be called the fallacy 
of provisionalism. Children are perishing by the thousands, 
it is said, owing to malnutrition. The labor of young, im- 
mature persons is being ruthlessly exploited. The housing 
conditions in the slums are appalling. Men willing to work 
are walking the streets in consequence of the reckless action 
of unenlightened or unscrupulous employers. Let us then apply 
ourselves with might and main to the correction of these 
palpable, incontestable evils, and work for the higher ideals 
of society later on. Now no doubt some headway can be 
made by working for these ‘provisional ends. Sentiment, 
self-interest, can be appealed to, and the factors that make 
for unfairness can be made to yield to a certain extent, but 
only to a certain extent. Wages can be raised so long as 
their increase is consistent with the accumulation of profit. 
When, however, the cessation of profit itself is threatened, 
there is an end of concession. The motive, the principle that 
operates in the competitive system then stands forth as an in- 
surmountable obstacle. Better housing can be supplied here 
and there by benevolent employers—a complete change in the 
housing system is resisted tooth and nail. Certain forms of 
the piratical instinct in business are prohibited; big business 
declares with self-complacency, we have seen a new light; but 
the same ruthless instinct, like a flood which is dyked at one 
point, breaks out in new quarters, under new modes or disguises, 


SOCIAL RECONSGRUGLION: s290 


betterment is whether it will better human 
beings, the betterment of conditions being 
a means to that end. But, it may be asked, 
does not socialism successfully pass this 
test? Do not its followers look forward to 
the reign of fraternity on earth? Do they 
not count on fraternity to make the opera- 
tion of their system possible? Yes, it will 
at once make socialism possible and be its 
flower and effulgence; and hence there will 
be, it is believed, a change in human beings 
themselves, a larger and sweeter motive will 
take the place of the egoistic. 





There is no help for it. Man is actuated by motives, and 
unless the motives can be changed, there will be no stead- 
fast, no large, last’1g improvement, even in material condi- 
tions. Unless a new respect for human nature as such can be 
won, the power will be lacking to support the efforts that 
are demanded, even toward material betterment. Unless the 
poorest of the poor are seen as beings having worth, the 
values to which they may justly lay claim will never be ac- 
corded to them. There will be a little lightening of their 
heavy burden, the scanty requirements of what is called a 
“decent” way of living may be provided, so far as is com- 
patible with the continued living in palaces of the rich; but 
social reconstruction in any thoroughgoing sense will not take 
lace. 

: Moreover, by leading the masses into the class war, hatred 
is fostered inevitably, even though the war be directed osten- 
sibly against the system, and not against individuals; and by 
fixing attention on material wealth as the object to be gained 
by the working class, with the provisional exclusion of the 
higher gains, the mind of the masses will be more and more 
steeped in materialism, held fast in materialism, 


130 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


Of the three catch phrases of the French 
Revolution, liberty is the favorite watch- 
word of capitalism; fraternity and equality 
are appropriated by socialism—fraternity as 
a means of bringing about and maintaining 
equality, and, thereafter, as the psychical 
result of the equality attained. Men, hav- 
ing acquired the habit of looking on each 
other as equals, are expected to feel for each 
other as brothers.* 

To put the matter briefly, the points im- 
plied in the above are three: 

I. Fraternity will help to establish equal- 
ity. 

2. The fraternity feeling will maintain 
equality when established. 

3. The fraternity feeling will be a new 

4Tt is a notorious fact, however, that in no relation is fric- 
tion more common, and more distressing, than between broth- 
ers. The first pair of brothers are an example. The tie of 
consanguinity is indeed favorable to mutual kindness _be- 
tween natures that happen ty» be sympathetic. It is apt to 
strain to the breaking point the relation of those who are 
naturally antipathetic. They are thorns in each other’s side. 
Ethically brotherhood must be considered as a means of creat- 
ing respect and love by the unlike for the unlike. The word 


a, at present used designates the sympathy of the like for the 
1Ke, 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 131 


motive making human nature more excel- 
lent. 

As to point one, fraternity is the sympathy 
felt by the like for the like. This does tend 
toward the establishment of equality. The 
working class to-day is militant. In the 
trenches, the distinctions of birth and even 
of rank tend to be more or less obliterated. 
Men are exposed to the same dangers, are 
moved by the same animosities and hopes 
of victory. There is brotherhood in arms. 
iUhewsameris, true un thevsocialywar: (The 
diversities of function and interest that actu- 
ally subsist among the workers tend at least 
to be minimized.’ 

As to point two, assume that the battle is 
won, that the class of manual workers are 





5 That they actually continue to operate, as between the craft 
unions and unskilled labor, is felt to be a great hindrance to 
the progress of the working class movement. 

In the theory of socialism, the functional diversities of the 
workers are reduced to a common denominator. The brain- 
workers as well as the various manual workers are classed 
simply under the head of abstract work—the kind of work 
done being relatively ignored in comparison with the one fact 
that work is done. Never has abstraction been carried to a more 
extreme degree than by these empirical theorists who deride 
ideologies. The claim of a man to an equal share in the 
product is based on the fact that he renders his share of this 
abstract thing—work. 


132 SPT REAL vie 


in possession. ‘They constitute the over- 
whelming majority. The brain workers will 
be their servants. Will the fraternity feel- 
ing continue to operate? Will it maintain 
equality after temporarily equality has been 
established? It is more than likely, it seems 
inevitable, that all the differences of inter- 
est, of function, will reappear, and that the 
system which in the main ignores these dif- 
ferences will not live. 

Point three. This is the one that has the 
greatest significance for us, since we are 
concerned more for the improvement of the 
producer, than for the distribution of the 
product. Will the fraternity motive (un- 
derstood as sympathy of the like for the 
like) ennoble mankind? The emphasis of 
protherhood at the present time is the sign of 
an honorable reaction against the unjust dis- 
criminattons that have hitherto prevailed in 
the social system, against privilege founded 
on birth, against hierarchical authority 
founded on the pretension to supernatural 
gifts, against a hideous plutocracy. The 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 133 


emphasis on likeness is a rebound against the 
unfair, untenable distinctions that have been 
made between man and man. The real un- 
likenesses, however, subsist, are rooted in the 
nature of man, are not only ineffaceable, but 
the very condition and opportunity of the 
higher development of the race Such are 
the diversities of sex, of talent, of na- 
tional character and the like. The over- 
stressing of fraternity, seen from this point 
of view, is a formidable menace to the moral 
progress of society, as appears, for instance, 
in the classical example of Plato’s Repub- 
lic. Fraternalism as the key relation abol- 
ishes the family, the closer relations between 
parents and children, between husbands and 
wives. It destroys those initial intimacies in 
which the strong ties between human beings 
are first formed, to be thereafter extended 
and multiplied. It cuts the roots of the trees 
in the hope that leaning on each other for 
support the forest will become a more com- 
pact whole. Every adult male is to be re- 
vered as a father, every adult woman as a 


134 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


mother; every youth is to be loved as a 
brother, every maiden as a sister. It fails 
to see that under the arrangements contem- 
plated there will not be many fathers, but 
no fathers, not many brothers and sisters, 
but no brothers and sisters. It fails to 
see that the closer relations are the soil 
in which those reverences and loves spring 
up that become enriched in the wider rela- 
tions. A vague sympathy for all is to take 
the place of the firm affection for the few. 
But a house erected on sand cannot stand. 

If, then, its effect in improving the human 
being as such is the test of any system of 
social reconstruction, socialism, as tried by 
this test, cannot be approved. If fraternity 
as described is to be the outcome of it, its 
effect will be to dissipate the better feelings 
and eventually not to ennoble, but to de- 
grade, the human species.° 

Having thus briefly considered capitalism 


6 Plato, it is true, prescribes communism only for the mem- 
bers of the ruling class, in order to keep them united, and 
relies not so much on sympathy, as on common devotion to 
an intellectual and artistic ideal. 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 135 


and socialism, and having insisted that they 
must be tried and judged by their effect on 
the producers, it is time to ask more defi- 
nitely what kind of effect on the producer we 
are demanding, what we mean by making 
human beings more excellent, by improving 
human nature. From the spiritual point of 
view the answer is explicit. The spiritual 
principle to be substituted for the individual- 
istic or collectivistic principles is clear. As 
a spiritual being, man’s commerce with the 
finite world has for its object to produce the 
consciousness of his infinite nature. He is 
not of course pure spirit; he 1s a psycho- 
physical being as well, but he is to discharge 
even his animal functions in such a way as 
to testify to his spiritual character; more 
than that, he is to treat such functions as op- 
portunities for the affirmation and confirma- 
tion of the loftier attributes. What, for 
instance, can be a more animal-like function 
than eating, supplying the bodily machine 
with fuel? And yet the human way of tak- 
ing food is precisely that which places man 


136 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


at the greatest distance from the animal. 
The daily habit of the members of a house- 
hold to sit down at a common table becomes 
the means of fostering the sense of family 
unity; the common repasts of literary and 
other societies are occasions for “The feast 
of reason and the flow of soul;” the sacri- 
ficial banquets of the ancients were the ritu- 
als of religion however crude; the agape of 
the early Christians and the communion ser- 
vice down to the present illustrate how the 
touch of the spiritual upon the physical 
transforms the physical, makes a physical 
act instrumental to a spiritual meaning. 
The same is true of the function of re- 
production, which likewise assimilates man 
to the lower creatures, and yet more sub- 
limely marks the difference between him and 
them; for the sex relation is not merely re- 
fined by love, but at its best it gives rise to 
the sense of an indissoluble connection of 
soul with soul. The god triumphs in the 
dust; the spiritual triumphs in subduing the 
physical to its own use. Not to walk 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 137 


through the world unspotted of the world, 
is the aim, holding up one’s skirts as it were 
meticulously, so that they shall not be soiled; 
on the contrary, we are to take hold confi- 
dently of the things that seem most soiling, 
and to assoil them by the cleansing touch.’ 

The turn I am taking in the discussion 
of social reconstruction is to apply this same 
thought to physical work, to the work of a 
man’s hands, as well as to every other kind 
of work. Eating has a physical object—to 
keep the body replenished; it has also an- 
other and higher purpose. The physical be- 
comes the opportunity of asserting this 
higher purpose. Reproduction has a physical 
object—the preservation of the human spe- 
cies; alongside of this, superior to this, a 
spiritual purpose. The same idea, when ap- 
plied, will in a sense transfigure the physical 
task of those who labor in the mills, by put- 
ting the function of the manual laborer in the 
same class with those other functions which 


7 The proverb says that one cannot touch pitch without 
being defiled; but modern chemistry has extracted from coal 
tar the most beautiful dyes, the most helpful medicaments. 


138 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


serve physical ends, and at the same time 
lend themselves as subservient to the spir- 
itual ends of man. This is the chief point 
I wish to bring out in the present chapter. 
What supremely matters is that this change 
of attitude be envisaged. On the problem of 
how it can be carried out in practice, I shall 
presently offer some reflections, but the 
changed point of view is what I have most 
at heart to urge.* 

I shall next consider the idea of service, 
which in recent writings has been promi- 
nently put forward as offering the purer 
principle and the motive that is needed for 
social reconstruction. The performance of 
services by the members of society is un- 
avoidable. The most hard-hided egotist, 
whatever his motives, has got to render some 
service in order to get his gains. But where 


8 My readers will remember that I am discussing principles 
and not schemes, still less panaceas. The physical needs are 
so imperative, and for the great majority of men still so 
meagrely satisfied that a change in the attitude toward work 
can only be expected to take place in the course of generations. 
Yet it matters momentously that the right goal be set up, and 
that the leaders of thought, in planning next steps, see to it 
that these steps be taken in the right direction. 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 139 


the intention is to perform service for the 
sake of private, selfish gain, it is almost 
certain to be ill performed. And above all, 
the man himself is likely to be debased by 
making service subordinate to income in- 
stead of income subordinate to service, 
thereby reversing the relation that morally 
should subsist between public and private 
ends. 

The conception of service now commonly 
advocated puts the emphasis on the doing of 
things that are useful to the community, for 
the sake of the doing of them in the best pos- 
sible way. The centre of gravity in a man’s 
consciousness is to be transferred from his 
self to the multitude of his fellow beings. 
And it is believed that by such transference 
human nature will actually be improved, 
since each one will care more for the advan- 
tage of others than his own; and the test to 
which we insist on subjecting any and every 
plan of social reconstruction, it seems, might 
thus be met. Altruism, specialized in various 
kinds of social service, would be the solution. 


140 SPIRITUAER TDEAL 


In an industrial system arranged on such a 
plan there would be no more profits. The 
thirst for profits would be quenched. Net- 
ther would there be a struggle between the 
manual workers and the brain workers en- 
gaged in industry for the larger share of the 
product. The efficient performance of func- 
tion would be the prevailing motive. Pride 
in the performance of function would in- 
spire the workers. There would, of course, 
be the necessary division of labor, the assign- 
ment of the different tasks to the different 
talents. There would be executives, man- 
agers, superintendents, hand workers. The 
scientists engaged in the research laborato- 
ries that are now attached to great industrial 
plants would also, and perhaps preemi- 
nently, be reckoned among the functionaries 
of an industry; so would the artists, when 
connected with an industry. 

But at this point it must be remembered 
that the different functions will tend to 
breed different interests, diversity in the 
points of view. The scientist engaged in re- 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 141 


search is naturally interested in the outcome 
of his experiments; he is not as such inter- 
ested in the manual laborers, to whom he 
prescribes the processes after he has dis- 
covered the formula. The executive, admin- 
istrative officer is likely to be interested in 
creating a perfect machine, the foreman per- 
haps in getting the utmost quantity of work 
out of the workers. What, then, is to prevent 
friction? The answer of the service principle 
as described is: the bond of unity will be the 
common desire to benefit the community. 
But how to benefit them? By producing 
material goods such as serve for men’s con- 
venience and commodity; in the shoe indus- 
try, for instance, by producing shoes; in the 
textile industry by producing fabrics in the 
requisite quantity and quality. But will ser- 
vice, as expressed in such material satisfac- 
tion of mankind, disinfect the service of its 
materialistic taint? Will it truly ennoble 
the man who renders it? 

In the previous chapter, when speaking of 
incompatibilities in marriage, of the clash 


142 PIR TAs 


between the sexes, I stated as a general rule 
to be observed in all relations where there 
is likely to be a conflict of interests and pur- 
poses, that such conflicts can only be over- 
come by presenting to the minds of the par- 
ties concerned an overarching end, an ob- 
jective end loftier than their subjective ends, 
in the joint promotion of which they will ex- 
press their real, essential selves. Is the pro- 
duction of shoes in the requisite quantity, 
and of fabrics in the requisite quantity, etc., 
an overarching end of this kind? Will it in 
the long run be found adequate to unify the 
factors that clash in industry? 

Commerce with the finite, I have said in a 
previous paragraph, should be the means for 
man of asserting his infinite nature; work 
should be regarded like food taking and re- 
production, as an occasion for the worker 
to achieve the consciousness of his spiritual 
relations. And this finally leads to the ideal 
organic principle of social reconstruction, 
as the one which is here submitted as fit to 
replace the individualistic competitive, the 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 143 


collectivist, and the specialized altruistic or 
the social service principle, as the latter is 
commonly understood. In an industrial sys- 
tem planned on the ideally organic principle, 
the personal relations will count above every~ 
thing else, the development of the right per- 
sonal relations between the unlike workers 
will be the object aimed at. The making of 
shoes is necessary, like the taking of food, 
but the making of the shoes itself will come 
to be regarded with a certain irony, as a 
necessity to which spiritual .beings in the 
finite world are subject. It will not itself be 
the terminus ad quem of their efforts, it will 
be the means of creating between them cer- 
tain personal relations, a certain ideally or- 
ganic relation, namely a relation such that 
each of the different functionaries will seek to 
perform his task in such a way as to bring out 
the best performance of their diverse tasks 
by the others. I am dealing here with an 
abstract principle; and every principle enun- 
ciated as.a principle is abstract, but becomes 
concrete in its application. Right personal 


144 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


relations are human relations, and a human 
being is never a mere hand; he has also 
a mind and a will. The right personal 
relations would be for one thing the recip- 
rocal stimulation of the intelligence of the 
workers. Every industry to-day is saturated 
with mind. Industry may be regarded as 
the pragmatic aspect of science, the executive 
application of science, and of invention based 
on science. The challenge coming from the 
side of industry has been a prime factor in 
bringing about the advances of science. 
The progress of the science of electricity is 
one example among athousand. At present 
all that is high in science is capitalized in the 
minds of a few experts. Cannot this treas- 
ure be so simplified as to be conveyed to the 
minds of those who use its practical appli- 
cations, awakening intellectual response in 
them? Cannot the story of inventions be so 
treated as to make the man who manipulates 
the machine aware of the brain power that 
is stored up in the machine? 

Again, the fine arts in their best period 





SOCTALVRECONSTRUGCTION: 145 


were rooted in the handicrafts—drew from 
them their vital sap. Do we not desire 
that this relation between the artist and the 
artisan shall be reéstablished, to the advan- 
tage of both? 

But, above all, a human being is endowed 
with will. A really human being is dis- 
tinguished from a slave in so far as he exer- 
cises his will. Cannot the will of all the 
different workers be so united that each 
shall retain its character as an independent 
factor, while adding its distinctive increment 
to the resultant total will? 

Industrial representation would make the 
beginning of such a development in the di- 
rection of the organic ideal. Industrial rep- 
resentation, indeed, may mean much or little. 
It may be favored by some as a method to 
quell the unrest of the manual workers; it 
may be demanded by the manual workers as 
a defense against encroachment—the lower- 
ing of wages, the lengthening of hours of 
work—or as a means of correcting obviously 
bad conditions. But it may also have the im- 


146 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


mense significance of being the first step 
toward the real organization of one of the 
great social group, the group engaged in 
industry.” 

The council of a great industry would in- 
clude all the functionaries that are factors 
in it. The main objects would be three: 

1. The basic material object of furnishing 
the product in the requisite quantity and 
quality. | 

2. The fixing of salaries, regulated by the 
rule that the income shall be sufficient to 
support the worker, whatever his task, in the 
best possible performance of it.”° 


®— do not say industrial democracy, because that connotes 
in popular language the kind of democracy, or indiscriminate 
mass rule, which at present obtains in the political field. 


10 The idea of remuneration would be entirely eliminated. 
There is no possible equation between work done and merit, 
That every man should enjoy the fruits of his labor is a 
preposterous proposal, because no one can dissect out the fruits 
of one man’s labor, so as to isolate them from the fruits of 
others’ labor. The assignment of income must be teleological, 
not causal. In a state of society as contemplated, the so- 
called higher workers would lay little store by outward con- 
ditions of life differing greatly from those of their fellows. 
What they need in the way of aids for their work they 
would care for. A certain increase of income, however, 
would doubtless be allowed to those who have made good 
by way not of remuneration but of recognition. Increased in- 
comes might also be allowed to those on whom others are 
dependent. 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 147 


3. The true ideal object is the promoting 
of action and reaction between the minds 
and wills of the different functionaries. 
Adult education would here have a great 
role to play. The mind of one worker is 
to strike sparks of intellectual fire from out 
the minds of his fellow workers. Even the 
humblest of them could be intellectually 
energized by contact with the more gifted. 
The higher and highest functionaries in turn 
would gain by the constraint placed upon 
them of so ripening their thought as to make 
it apt for assimilation by the mentally less 
fortunate. Some mental life slumbers in 
every brain; some stream of intellectual life 
is latent in every man. There is no greater 
test of high intellectual ability than that of 
performing the miracle of the prophet, that 
of striking the unpromising rock and draw- 
ing living water from it. In general it is my 
belief that what is miscalled the democratic 
relation in industry, as in every other sphere, 
is really not a relation between persons on 
the same level, but between those on a higher 


148 SPIRE ROAST Dies 


level, and those on a lower level, and that 
those who are on a higher level can only 
maintain themselves where they are by the 
constant effort to draw upward those on the 
lower level. 

The adult education of the workers, be- 
sides dealing with the science that is en- 
shrined in the processes, the machinery, etc., 
should seek to give to the worker as a mem- 
ber of the industrial group, a knowledge of 
the raw material with which he deals, a 
knowledge of the countries from which the 
raw material is drawn, of the people of those 
countries, their manners, their customs, their 
psychology. Adult education should give to 
the workers a knowledge of the social and 
economic history of his industry as a whole, 
not only of the labor movement, and espe- 
cially of the effects of industry and com- 
merce, on religion and government, in fact, 
on all the main activities of mankind.” 


11Jn a parallel course on the idea of culture (delivered 
alongside the present six Hibbert lectures), I presented the 
thought that an artisan can be a cultured person as well as a 
poet or a scholar. He is cultured who realizes the effect pro- 
duced by his vocation on the other chief vocations—both the 


BOGUAI RECONSIRUGLION 140 


In the next place, the great council of an 
industry would care for the recreation of the 
workers, and in this connection the develop- 
ment in them of the appreciation of beauty 
—hbeauty in lines, colors, sounds, and also 
in the forms of human intercourse. Among 
the types of recreation would doubtless be 
instrumental and vocal music, exercises in 
rhythmic movement, pageants, plays and the 
like. The purpose of recreation, however, 
is not merely to amuse, but to re-create, to 
renew the spontaneity, the zest, the capacity 
of the workers for vital working. And if this 
is granted, then greater attention ought to 
be given than at present to the kind of recrea- 
tion which is suited to the different voca- 
tions. The art of unbending has been too 





stimulating and the detrimental effects—and who, in the stint 
of years g-anted him to work in, seeks to enhance the one 
and to correct the others. Science, art, as well as trade and 
industry, have in the main thus far been single track pur- 
suits, intent each on its own special object, drawing indeed 
on other lines of work, laying them under contribution, but 
not primarily concerned with their effect on the rest. Thus 
science, in the pursuit of scientific aims, has injured the 
religious interests of mankind, just as religion at one time 
injured science; thus commercialism, the pursuit of trade for 
the sake of the extension of trade, is to-day threatening civiliza- 
tion in its dearest concerns, 


150 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


little studied. The lawyer employs certain 
faculties to excess, so does the business man, 
so does the clergyman, etc. What kind of 
recreation then does each need to redress the 
balance? Plato carefully scrutinized the va- 
rious kinds of music, with a view to deter- 
mining the influence they exercise on the 
minds of those whom he would charge with 
the rulership of the state, favoring some 
melodies and eliminating others. The task 
that Plato assumed for one vocational group 
should be taken up for all the groups. In 
our modern cities every kind of music, 
fiercely passionate, noble, trivial, is offered 
at random to whoever chooses to come and 
hear. Plays of every description, fine and 
bestial, are acted on the open stage without 
regard even to the age of the spectators. 
Few are the attempts made to fit the glove 
to the hand, to give to the mind the peculiar 
delight in which it is renewed. Industrial 
representation, no longer confined to the 
rough problems which it now encounters, 
will have this task, among others, set for it, 


DUCTAL SRECONSLTRUGEION@ rst 


that of solving the problem of furnishing to 
the workers the beauty that is ennobling, 
the joy that is rejuvenating.” 

But the central thought in regard to in- 
dustrial life is still this, that in the delibera- 
tions and decisions of the grand council of 
an industry, the will of every worker, 
whatever his grade of work, shall be 
represented; that no one shall be merely, as 
Aristotle described the slave, a passive instru- 
ment, only just sufficiently human to obey 
the commands of a superior, but shall have 
his due part in originating the decisions to 
which he is subject. Not indeed that he 


12 But there is a lion in the path, a huge obstacle is in the 
way, of the spiritual penetration of work—it is the blunting 
uniformity of machine tending. In agriculture this is not 
equally the case. In it the ccnnection of the hand work with 
biology, chemistry, etc., is close. Agricultural work is be- 
coming more and more a liberal pursuit. For the mass of 
industrial workers, however, the way out seems to be the 
shortening of the shifts of uniform labor, leaving an ever 
larger margin of hours for the man’s true work; not deadly, 
deadening tasks for a certain number of hours, and leisure 
or play for the rest of the time, as is sometimes advocated, 
but uniform work, since it must be done, during a decreasing 
number of hours, "and true work for the rest of the working 
day. Agriculture alongside of industry, the development of 
the handicrafts, would furnish opportunity for such work, and 
in addition a large industrial group will employ its own teach- 
ers for its children, physicians and nurses for its sick, and 
experts in all the arts in its scheme of recreation. 


152 SPIRITUAL TD EATS 


shall merely put his will into the pool to fight 
it out with the other wills, but rather that by 
contact and comparison his will may be mod- 
ified and enlightened, and enter, thus modi- 
fied and enlightened, into the resultant 
united will, he himself being ethicized in the 
process. 

Finally, the council of the industry should 
particularly concern itself with the training 
of apprentices, those to whom the torch is 
to be handed on, who are to be the successors 
of the present generation of workers. For 
nothing is so apt to give distinctness to the 
ideals of a vocation as the sense of respon- 
sibility on the part of those who are engaged 
in it to transmit those ideals to the next com- 
ers on the scene, and to make the success- 
sors more fit and more devoted in the pur- 
suit of them. If any one asks himself: 
What kind of man do I desire him to be who 
will carry on my work after me? he will find 
that his own sense of its significance, its 
wide bearings, its worth will thereby be im- 
measurably augmented. 


SOGIAL TRECONSHRUGLION® 153 


I said farther back that I am submitting a 
principle and not a scheme. The above sug- 
gestions on the method of applying the prin- 
ciple are by way of illustration only. One 
who is not himself an industrial worker, and 
only sees the ebb and flow of industrial life 
from the outside, may get a certain definite 
impression of the direction in which it should 
be turned. He can record his sketch of the 
wiser plan of things, but it is only the men 
who are in immediate touch with the con- 
crete realities of the situation, its enormous 
difficulties, and its no less vast possibilities, 
who finally, using inventiveness and genius 
combined with ethical inspiration, can defi- 
nitely devise a workable plan. 

My contention is that every social system 
is based on a principle, latent or overt; that 
social reconstruction must be based on a 
principle; that the principle we are to adopt, 
however slowly it may permeate, is to be 
tested by its effect, not chiefly in increasing 
the product, or the enjoyment of the produc- 
ers, but by its effect on the producers them- 


154 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


selves, by its effect in promoting the evolu- 
tion of the human species toward a loftier 


type. 
My thesis is that neither the principle of 


individual competition nor that of collectiv- 
ism, nor that of social service as described, 
is adequate to pass this test; that work must 
be considered as an opportunity for the per- 
fecting of the personal relations involved 
therein; that these personal relations must 
be spiritual, that is, exemplifying the ideally 
organic relation; * that the supreme task is 


13 The words “organic” and “organization” have become vul- 
garized in common usage. Organization has almost come to 
mean no more than association. Any mass of men held to- 
gether in the most mechanical fashion is nowadays called an 
organization. It would be helpful to coin a word like “met- 
organic” on the model of metempirical and metaphysical, to 
denote the sublime relation to which I have constantly referred 
in the text. The principle which is the basis of the recon- 
structed spiritual ideal 1 am presenting might then be briefly 
designated as the metorganic principle, in contrast to the 
individualistic, the socialisti>, etc. 

A curious phenomenon may here also be noticed by the way, 
namely, that the notion of organism has been freely used by 
precisely the most pronounced individualists. The Stoic is an 
individualist, but Marcus Aurelius makes a special point of 
reminding us that what is good for the swarm is good for the 
bees, and that we are as eyes and ears and hands to one an- 
other. The Christian ethic is intensely individualist, but from 
the Christian scripture comes to us the dictum ‘that we are 
members of one another. And again Herbert Spencer, in his 
philosophic writings, constantly makes use of the notion of 
organism, although few have gone to greater length in assert- 
ing the individualistic position than he. The explanation is 


SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 155 


that of personalizing the depersonalized 
masses of mankind, and their present deper- 
sonalized masters as well. 


not far to seek. The individualist approves of the division and 
specification of functions, in order that he may be the less 
hindered in the performance of his own function, and he per- 
forms his function in order to express to the utmost his single, 
individual self. Exchange of service is also taken for granted 
under the rule of Do ut des. But all this is at the opposite 
pole of the truly organic idea of finding one’s life in quickening 
the life of others. 


Vy 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 


FEW preliminary remarks may be in 
A order first on the state. 

The word “state” suggests fixity, status, 
established order, leaving out the idea of 
living growth. 

The alternative word “commonwealth” 
intimates too pointedly the notion of wealth, 
or well-being, enjoyed in common. 

The word “nation” suggests peculiarity or 
idiosyncrasy owned at birth. We have to 
do the best we can with an inadequate vo- 
cabulary, developing new meanings out of 
the old stock as experience forces them on 
us. 

As to “sovereignty,” the various social in- 
stitutions, the family, the vocation, the state, 
etc., are successive stations through which 


1Cf. for the matter discussed in this chapter, the chapters 
on the State and the International Society in my Ethical 
Philosophy of Life. 
156 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 157 


the individual passes on the way to the ac- 
quisition of personality. Sovereignty is not 
restricted to the state. Every group has a 
sovereignty of its own. The family is 
sovereign within its own precincts. There 
are limits within which the relations of hus- 
band and wife, of parents and children, are 
sacrosanct against outside interference. The 
vocational group is or should be sovereign 
within its own sphere.” So is the state sov- 
ereign, and finally there is a precinct within 
which the individual in his privacy is supreme 
—in respect to the freedom of conscience, for 
instance. The sovereignty of the state has 
been more in evidence, and has been more 
frequently discussed, because it is connected 
with the use of force within its borders and 
the warding off of force from the outside. 
Of this circumstance I shall speak later on. 
But in essence the sovereignty of the state 
does not differ from that of the other groups. 
There are rights and obligations within the 


2 See the previous chapter. 


158 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


state and against the state. There are rights 
and obligations stretching beyond the state. 

In the series of groups each anterior group 
is orientated toward the succeeding ones, 
and cannot be defined without reference to 
its spiritually educational work in preparing 
its members for entrance into the next fol- 
lowing group. The family cannot be defined 
without reference to the vocation; the voca- 
tion cannot be defined without reference to 
the state or nation; and the idea of the nation 
cannot be grasped without reference to the 
society of mankind, of which the nation is 
designed to be spiritually a member.* 

It has been said recently that a nation can- 
not be described except as a body of people 
who believe themselves to be one. But surely 
it ought to be possible to get beneath this 
surface description. 

The idea of civilization is the fundamental, 


8 So far is it from being true that state sovereignty neces- 
sarily excludes the idea of the supersovereignty of mankind 
that, on the contrary, the conception of the state falls into 
Gia errors whenever that ulterior destination is left out 
of sight. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND | 1so 


clarifying factor to be here introduced. 
Every nation represents a certain type of 
human civilization. Its unity consists in this, 
its type. Other nations have produced and 
are producing unlike types of civilization. 
The society of mankind is the organization 
in which these different types are to be 
assembled, in which each is to play its func- 
tional part in evoking from the others their 
best possible contributions to the ulterior 
perfection of civilization. The ideal of the 
perfect civilization is the vinculum soctetatis 
humane, and stipplies that overarching end 
which is necessary to overcome the friction 
and clashes of the nations with one another. 
But is the term “civilization” large enough, 
wide enough, deep enough, exalted enough, 
to carry this significance? 

What is civilization and who is a civilized 
being? Civilization is commonly taken to 
mean the sum total of the things that dis- 
tinguish the life of men, say in the twentieth 
century, from that of primitive tribes. Popu- 
lous cities, no longer holes in the rocks or 


160 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


lake dwellings, swift transportation facili- 
ties, the use of electrical power and the like, 
together with certain acquired knowledges 
and skills, are reckoned among the factors 
of civilization. A civilized being, then, would 
be one who has the advantage of such ex- 
ternal conditions, and who in some degree, 
participates in the sciences and arts of his 
generation. In addition the notion of civili- 
zation applies to manners. Civilized society 
and polite society are well-nigh synonymous 
expressions. Uncivilized deportment is such 
as befits the vulgus or crowd, and is out of 
place in a civitas, in a society subject to such 
refined customs as possess the prescriptive 
force of laws. 

But it must be confessed that the connota- 
tion of civilized has not hitherto been con- 
spicuously ethical.* And this for two rea- 
sons: the one, that the word civilization sug- 





4We distinguish between vulgarity and immorality. Vul- 
garity, as a rule, refers to manners, and not to morals. The 
most unprincipled man of the world, the most heartless cynic, 
provided he is refined in manner, would not be classed as an 
uncivilized person. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 161 


gests the public aspect of life, the conve- 
niences and commodities with which that life 
is furnished, the external polish and glitter 
of human intercourse, while the term ‘‘eth- 
ical” refers to the inner worth of men, which 
has not hitherto been deemed capable of 
expression in public life, in business or in 
politics. The second reason is that under 
the influence of Christianity, the czvitas 
terrestris, which is the vehicle and the em- 
bodiment of civilization, has been set in 
opposition to the civitas superna, which rep- 
resents the ideal of a society ethically desir- 
able, ethically perfect. Antagonism has 
thus been deemed to exist between civili- 
sation and spirituality. Many a Christian 
has believed that to be ethical or spiritual 
he must turn his back on civilization and 
all its works. But if one takes the point of 
view which I am here submitting, if one 
thinks of the different groups as stations 
on the way to personality, if one regards the 
larger groups, owing to their more complex 


162 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


internal and external relations, as offering 
enhanced opportunity for the application of 
the spiritual rule—that of eliciting the best 
in others and thereby in oneself—if one 
thinks of finite conditions as the raw ma- 
terial on which the spiritual nature of man 
is to leave its imprint, then civilization may 
well stand, must stand, for the highest ex- 
pression of the infinite spirit in the finite 
human world; and then it at once follows 
that there is as yet no civilized society, but 
only a society in the process of becoming 
civilized; that there is as yet no civilized na- 
tion, but only nations in process of becoming 
civilized; that there is as yet no civilized 
man, but only men in the way of becoming 
civilized. 

From this standpoint we can now speak 
of a collective, unitary task of mankind, and 
the idea of this task furnishes the uniting 
principle of the world society, or the interna- 
tional society. The task of humanity is to 


build up a genuine civilization, a corpus 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 163 


spirituale of mankind, a counterpart, how- 
ever incomplete, of the infinite spiritual so- 
ciety, a civitas terrestris reflecting the civttas 
superna. 

And each nation, as an organic member of 
this corpus spirituale, is to offer its contribu- 
tion toward the fulfillment of the one all- 
embracing task. How? Each nation repre- 
sents a certain type of the imperfect 
civilization which already exists. In the 
more advanced nations the type is more ex- 
plicit. In the more advanced nations it is 
possible to see this type mirrored, in its 
laws, in its literature, in the acts and the emo- 
tions which constitute its political history, 
in its manners and customs, in its religion.° 
It is impossible to contemplate the mind of 
the French people, the English mind, the 
German mind, the Russian mind, the Italian 


mind, without becoming aware of the irre- 


5 Even where the religion is nominally the same, as among 
the Christian peoples, there are religious differences that point 
to characteristic differences in the national genius, the national 


164 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


ducible intellectual, zesthetical and volitional 
differences that mark them off.” 

Each of these types has its excellences and 
its serious faults, its qualities and its defects. 
Every people, prompted by its collective sel- 
fishness, its vanity or its pride, is prone to 
exaggerate its excellences, and to ignore or 
indulgently tolerate its own faults. Terri- 
torial aggrandisement, the desire to possess 
the earth and the fullness thereof, the spirit 
of domination, are rationalized by an invet- 
erate national conceit. The Germans sing 
their futile song: “An deutschem Wesen soll 
die Welt genesen” (The German way shall 
heal a world astray). The French, at the 
outbreak of the great revolution, determined 
that their ideal of Liberty, Equality and Fra- 
ternity should sweep the European conti- 
nent, and Napoleon’s despotism was the out- 
come. The White Man’s Burden, invented 


6 A famous Roman dictum is: “Homo sum; nihil humanum 
a me alienum puto” (I am a man, and nothing human do I 
consider foreign to me). National conceit ridicuously trans- 
poses the order of the words in this dictum: “Homo sum; 
nihil a me alienum humanum puto” (I am the man, and nobody 
who is unlike myself do I consider to be quite up to the 
human standard). 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 165 


by Anglo-Saxon pride, is a burden laid on the 
brown man’s shoulders. And so it goes the 
world over. 

The forces that have produced the inter- 
national chaos, the cupidities, the racial an- 
tipathies, underneath them all the primitive 
ferocities, would not be as effective for mis- 
chief as they are, were they not supported 
and rationalized by national conceit—the 
conceit consisting in the one-sided emphasis 
of the excellences, with no attention paid to 
and no humility bred by, the corresponding 
faults. To transform national conceit into 
something better is the problem. And if 
once the spiritual relation between the great 
eroups of nations were envisaged, the prob- 
lem would at least advance toward its solu- 
tion. This does not mean that we are to 
attempt to abolish national self-conscious- 
ness. We should teach in our schools, em- 
phasize in our histories, the acts of our 
people and the qualities that are behind the 
acts which are to their credit; but we should 
sive to our people also the more complete 


166 SPIRTTUATNIDiGAL 


self-knowledge; not hushing up or glossing 
over the errors they have committed in 
the past—yes, their crimes. For there is 
not a so-called civilized people whose record 
does not contain the stain of actual crimes 
such as must bring the blush of shame to a 
lover of his country. Make your nation rea- 
lize the urgent need of self-purification, and 
point the way. The way is that of positive 
progress toward the perfection of one’s na- 
tional type, the continuous enhancement of 
its noble and excellent traits. And the 
method of achieving this result is to follow 
the spiritual rule. Help to elicit the best in 
other nations, and thereby in thine own. This 
practically means to study the types of the 
sister nations, to consider what are the more 
excellent traits which they possess, to seek 
as far as possible to assimilate these, and 
thus to put oneself in the position of being 
able to correct their faults, to strengthen 
them where they are weak, while in the proc- 
ess of so doing, the evil traits in one’s own 
type will gradually diminish and tend to dis- 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 167 


appear. The German possesses Griindlich- 
keit (thoroughness) in which Americans 
are deficient. Politically the Germans are 
deficient in the sense of collective responsi- 
vility. The value put on the expert is exces- 
sive. The control of the expert by the gen- 
eral public is too feeble. In America the 
force of the mass is excessive; the influence, 
in government, of the expert, of exceptional 
personality that stands out above the mass, 
is too feeble. America should assimilate 
the German virtue of Griindlichkeit, and give 
in return its own virtue of collective control. 

The West in its relations to the East af- 
fords a similar illustration of the point I am 
laboring. The West excels in science, in 
the mechanical arts, in all that pertains to 
the expression of the mind along the paths 
Sractivity, » Lhe Hast) excels in) dignity \in 
deep, detached contemplation. The West 
has done infinite harm to the East by forcing 
upon it its alien gifts unmodified, unrelated 
to the types of civilization which it invaded. 
Western civilization, western ideas, threaten 


168 SPIRIT OU Alea DEAT 


to undermine the solidarity feeling in Japan, 
threaten the ancestral piety of the Chinese. 
The blind conceit that pushes toward the im- 
perialistic domination of one’s own type is 
wrecking the dearest spiritual possessions 
of vast families of men.’ 

The ideal I have sketched is sufficiently far 
off. When we take up any morning news- 
paper, we constantly read of new aggres- 
sions, new acts of international violence— 
the hydra of imperialism puts forth new 
heads whenever a single one has been cut 
off—and we are apt, with a sinking of the 
heart, to ask ourselves whether the far vision 
of a corpus spirituale of mankind is anything 
more than an idle dream. Still, to ask 
this question is the unpardonable treachery. 
To distrust the moral ideal is to doubt that 





7 The ideal which I present rests on the recognition of types 
of civilization and their reciprocal perfection through inter- 
action. In the more advanced nations the type is clearly recog- 
nisable; among other nations the type has become stationary, 
relatively petrified; among the backward peoples a distinctive 
type is yet to be developed. It should be the main business 
of a union of civilized nations to lend its spiritual assistance 
especially to the child peoples of the earth, beholding in them 
the depositaries of a treasure, as yet latent, but capable of 
enriching mankind. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 169 


which we have found most certain where we 
are able to test it in inner experience. And 
we must not forget that even a plan of be- 
havior between national groups which sa- 
vors of real morality has never yet been 
proposed, except in the vaguest and most in- 
effective language. 


“Without the truth there is no knowing; 
Without the way there is no going” 


says Thomas a Kempis. First we must 
grasp the truth; must propose an ideal 
which, if it were turned into reality, would 
satisfy our moral nature. But without the 
Way there is no going; and the urgent ques- 
tion is, assuming that we begin to see the 
goal, what is the next step to be taken in 
that direction? How shall we go? How 
shall we direct mankind along that way? 
What can actually be done? 

Much can be done by what is technically 
called education—in the schools and col- 
leges, for instance, by exhibiting the por- 
traits of the various national minds. As has 
been said, the French mind, when compared 


170 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


with the English, or the German mind, 
or the Russian mind, stands out distinctly 
enough. A modern French philosopher, Al- 
fred Fouillée, has delineated the mind of his 
own people with the most exemplary inten- 
tion of impartiality. Again the German mind, 
with its plus and minus traits (as we may 
designate them), its attractive and its repel- 
lent qualities, stands our distinctly enough, 
as it is objectively exhibited in German law, 
German literature, German history, German 
music, etc. And the same is true of other 
national minds. One of the obvious meth- 
ods of promoting education for humanity 
is to introduce into schools and universities 
a “science of nations,” a knowledge of other 
nations and the types they represent, along 
with national self-knowledge. Chief stress 
should be put on the excellent traits of other 
peoples, with a view of engendering appre- 
ciation as the starting point. Love in the 
spiritual sense, not peace or prosperity, or 
even justice, is the bond that is competent 
to combine the peoples of the earth in unity. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 171 


“Thou shalt love thy neighor as thyself,” 
is a commandment that applies to nations as 
well as to individuals. 

But such education as can be given in the 
lower and higher schools is but a small 
part of real education which can only be ac- 
quired in and by practice. Nations as well 
as children must learn by doing. In other 
words, there must be institutions which shall 
facilitate such contact between peoples as 
will enable them to understand one another, 
both to admire and in the deeper sense to 
compassionate one another. For the evil 
traits in other nations should provoke com- 
passion, even as the evil life of the publican 
and the sinner provoked compassion in the 
founder of Christianity; while indignation, 
and a certain impatience of evil had better 
be reserved by each people for its own bad- 
nesses. 

In the light of these considerations, I 
shall now proceed to a brief examination of 
that League of Nations which was created 
at the close of the recent war, and which 


172 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


has since been the subject of ardent debate 
between its supporters and opponents. I 
do not ask: Does the plan of the League 
realize the ideal of a society of mankind? No 
one, I imagine, would make such a claim for 
it. Is it a beginning in the right direction? 

Certain advantages may at once be con- 
ceded to it. On its administrative side it 
lends itself to admirable achievements. In 
such matters as the abolition of the white- 
slave traffic and of the opium traffic, in secur- 
ing planetary cooperation to prevent the 
spread of those terrible pestilences that deci- 
mate the populations of the earth by millions, 
also in international cooperation for scien- 
tific research, and a much more difficult 
undertaking, in putting restrictions on the 
exploitation of labor. Cooperation of any 
kind has an educative value. Those who 
work together where there is no divergence 
of opinion or interest, are in a better frame 
of mind to attack those more “thorny” ques- 
tions in respect to which interests and 
opinions deviate. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 173 


A world court to decide justiciable cases, 
those cases, namely, in which the gain from 
a settlement of any kind outweighs the loss 
to be sustained by an adverse settlement, is 
no less a distinct step in advance. 

But when we face the nonjusticiable cases, 
those in which what is called national honor, 
national sovereignty, questions of supreme 
national interest, are involved, in respect 
to which each nation reserves to itself the 
right of independent decision without ap- 
Healy we come to the real crux both of the 
present and of future situations. Is the 
League competent to deal with such ques- 
tions? They are the war breeders. The 
world is weary of war. The prospect of new 
wars, to be waged with far more frightful 
instruments of destruction, is not remote, 
but ominously near. Does the League of- 
fer a safeguard against a renewal of such 
horrors, or is it a feeble reed likely to break 
at the very moment when men lean upon it? 
Will it prevent wars? Or, if it encourages 
in us a false reliance, will it not on the 


174 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


contrary only serve to bring the danger 
nearer? 

The vulnerable spot of the League, as at 
present constituted, is, as I see it, that it 
attempts, after all, to fight the devil with 
fire; in other words, that it relies on force. 
It is a league to enforce peace. The bare 
juxtaposition of the two words, Force and 
Peace, is paradoxical. It is possible to en- 
force submission—impotent, abject submis- 
sion—at least for a time, but peace is a state 
of mind. It is not possible to enforce a state 
of mind. The real problem is how to pro- 
duce the peace-ensuring state of mind in the 
nations. The whole issue is shifted from its 
proper base when the sword is once more 
evoked to end the use of the sword. The 
League as designed is a league to force sub- 
mission, not to ensure peace.® 

The misleading analogy drawn from the 


® Peace cannot be insured, either economic peace or inter- 
national peace, unless its terms be such as right reason and 
the moral nature of men approve of. Submission on the other 
hand can be obtained by force majeure; though the duration 
of submission, when gained by subjection, is precarious. Lord 
Cromer, in his instructive book on “Imperialism,” roundly 
declares that none of the Western nations, neither the Eng- 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND | 17s 


example of domestic courts of justice serves 
to confuse the debate. Did not the courts, 
it is said, put an end to the private feuds, 
the quarrels between individual and individ- 
ual? Why, then, should not a court put an 
end to the quarrels of nations, thus ruling 
out the class of nonjusticiable cases en- 
tirely, making all questions justiciable? A 
misleading analogy is one in which the 
points of likeness are stressed, the high light 
thrown upon them, while the points of dif- 
ference are slighted or ignored.® But the 
difference is immense between the quarrels 


lish, nor the French, nor even the Russians, have secured the 
allegiance of the subject peoples over whom they rule, and 
he ascribes this to that inveterate repugnance to foreign dom- 
ination, which is natural to the tribes of men everywhere. 
One is aware of the heaving and seething of revolt in the 
East, underneath the crust of Western supremacy. 


9 The craving of the average man for the simplification of 
complex problems leads to the construction of such mislead- 
ing analogies. The average man has come to realize the folly 
of war. He is weary of war. He sees that humanity has 
run into a kind of impasse. In his impatience he insists on 
some short-cut way out. The analogy of the court and the 
policeman’s club is just apparently simple enough to meet his 
views. But there is no short-cut way to peace, peace being a 
state of mind. In general it may be said that the tendency 
to undue simplification on difficult questions is one of the 
principal obstacles to real progress. It constantly leads men 
off on false scents, and into bypaths from which they must 
eventually retrace their steps. 


176 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


of nations and private quarrels. In the case 
of attacks on the life and property of individ- 
uals, and in civil cases as well, the rights of 
the parties concerned are in the main known 
and acknowledged. ‘The general principles 
are laid down. New law is indeed made from 
time to time, but the new law moves along 
the lines previously laid down. That a 
man’s life shall be immune against violence, 
that his property shall be safe against theft, 
that contracts shall be kept, etc., are matters 
on which the conscience of mankind is made 
up. The nonjusticiable cases that arise be- 
tween the nations, on the other hand, relate 
to matters on which the conscience of man- 
kind is not yet made up, is still in process 
of formation. The analogy, therefore, does 
not fit. Who shall say when the life of a 
nation is threatened? Is Germany killed 
when certain parts of Silesia are taken from 
her? Was France killed when she was 
deprived of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871? 
Who shall say when a nation has been 
robbed of its property? What, in fact, is 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 177 


its property? What are the boundaries to 
which it is entitled to lay claim? And how 
far has it such other rights as access to the 
sea, or to raw materials, such as rubber or 
oil and the like, in distant countries, in the 
tropics, in Asia? Or, again, what are the 
Rede td OntS) OF minorities, such as of the 
Czechs in Bohemia when the Germans were 
in control, or of the Germans now that the 
Czechs are in control, or of the Slovaks as 
against the Czechs? What are the rights of 
majorities as against the ruling minorities, 
as in India? In regard to all such questions 
as these, there is still wide disagreement, 
even among those who desire only that jus- 
tice shall be done, let alone those who are 
governed by less reputable motives. What 
I am calling attention to is that the dissimi- 
larity between the feuds of nations and the 
feuds of private individuals is parallel to the 
dissimilarity between those cases where the 
conscience of mankind is made up, and those 
other more numerous cases where the con- 
science of mankind is not yet made up— 


178 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


is indeed only in the early stages of forma- 
tion.”° 

To intrust the decision of the latter spe- 
cies of cases to a court would have a further 
inconvenience in that the judicial mind is 
apt to lean backward in the direction of 
precedents, as it properly may where the 
rights of the parties are known; and that 
it is therefore scarcely the suitable kind of 
mind to deal with unprecedented situations 
such as are constantly arising in interna- 
tional intercourse. 

One further consideration may be added: 
in deciding between individuals, two indis- 
pensable precautions are taken by the courts 
—the one, an elaborate system of procedure 
to sift the evidence, the other, regulations to 
secure the impartiality of judges. Among 
the most important of the latter is the pro- 
vision that those persons to whom judgment 





10Jt is also of great importance to observe that the rights 
of individuals depend on the principle of likeness, relating, as 
they do, to matters in respect to which all human beings are 
alike. All human beings ought to be treated as having iden- 
tical claims, while the rights of groups, both internal, and ex- 
ternal, depend on the principle of unlikeness, or the differen- 
tiation of functions. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 179 


is intrusted shall not themselves be parties in 
interest. This has no difficulty in the case 
of a controversy affecting any A and B, 
since there are millions of fellow citizens who 
have no personal interest in A and B or their 
concerns; but in the case of nations the sit- 
uation is absolutely different. Half a dozen 
nations rule the roost to-day in this world 
of ours. The smaller nations are dependent 
more or less on the good will of the more 
powerful. There is not a serious case of 
dispute, therefore, that can come up in the 
world court in which the judges themselves 
are not directly or indirectly interested on 
one side or the other. The indispensable 
safeguard of impartiality is lacking.” 
Finally, to return to the question of the 
use of force, it may be said, I think without 


11 The Supreme Court of the United States is sometimes 
cited as an illustration of the kind of superiority to prejudice 
which may be expected from particularly high-minded men 
summoned to decide in an international controversy. But the 
citation is not wholly fortunate if one remembers the action 
of Supreme Court judges at the time of the Hayes-Tilden 
election, when it was found at the critical juncture that the 
distinguished persons whose high-mindedness no one doubted 
nevertheless followed the bias of their Republican or Demo- 
cratic affiliation. 


180 SPIRIT ATO Tad 


fear of contradiction, that the force used by 
the courts is in essence not physical but 
moral force. The few thousand officers of 
police who maintain order in a great city 
would be powerless to do so did not the 
moral sense of the community support them. 
Yes, it is the moral sense of the community 
that must also find its echo in the mind of 
the offender against the law, and bring him, 
morally speaking, to his senses. Where this 
is not the case and mere force is used to sub- 
jugate the offender, the administration of 
justice is still barbarous. The object of all 
punishment, as modern penology recognizes, 
is not to break the will of the criminal, not to 
subject him to the force majeure of society, 
but to produce in him a state of mind apt to 
make for social peace. Mere repression, 
even in the domestic administration of jus- 
tice, is out of date. To use this antiquated 
method as an argument for mere repression 
by a league of nations would be deplorable. 

There are then nonjusticiable cases (let 
us face this fact), cases in which the con- 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 181 


science of mankind is not yet made up. The 
immediate aim of an incipient society of man- 
kind must be to devise methods by which the 
formation of a world conscience may be ac- 
celerated. One of these methods would be 
international conferences devoted to some 
single, urgent issue on which public opin- 
ion could be focused, like the recent Wash- 
ington Conference for Naval Disarmament. 
The distractedness of public opinion, due to 
the great variety of interests which in 
kaleidoscopic succession claim its attention, 
disables public opinion from exerting its 
proper influence. Public opinion at present 
is said to govern. But, in fact, public opinion 
is constantly baffled, rendered uncertain, 
hesitant and, save at rare moments, impuis- 
Sant epyetue dizzy. diversity, ol obiects 
toward which it is in turn directed. The 
concentration of public opinion is the sine 
qua non of its effectiveness. There is as yet 
no world public opinion. It has to be created. 
The authentic publicity of the discussions 
that would take place in such an international 


182 SPIRITUALVIDEAE 


conference is equally indispensable in order 
to thwart the insidious arts of prejudiced 
propaganda. 

The members of the international confer- 
ence, however, should include not only the 
diplomatic agents of government, but dele- 
gations, elected by the parliaments, repre- 
senting labor, commerce, and all the so- 
cial groups. The people who would suffer 
by the outbreak of war should be present in 
their delegates in the conference that is in- 
tended to prevent it. 

At a critical juncture, when war is immi- 
nent, the conference should be summoned and 
the confrontation of the parties concerned, 
in the midst of an international body, where 
the plea coming from either side could be 
sifted, would be in order. The Germans at 
the beginning of the late war were diligent 
enough in spreading their case broadcast in 
every country which they could reach; so 
were the Allies. But the situation would 
have been quite different if each had been 
compelled to present its side in the presence 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 183 


of the other side, not before a council of am- 
bassadors or of diplomats, but in the pres- 
ence of a body actually representing the 
world. Each side not being permitted one- 
sidedly to overstate its own case, would then 
have been compelled to meet the arguments 
of its adversary and then, with the eyes of 
mankind upon them, the specious preten- 
sions iby which each covered the motives it 
did not dare to confess would have been 
stripped off; they would have been chal- 
lenged to show the actual rightfulness of 
their pretensions or to suffer world condem- 
nation.” 

But I find myself in danger of passing into 
details that lead off from the main object 
with which I am here concerned. That ob- 
ject is to find a principle which, if men can be 


12Tt may be said that without any such confrontation the 
judgment of the world went against Germany, and that Ger- 
many at the Peace of Versailles, subscribed to the confession 
of her own exclusive guilt. But this was notoriously done 
under duress, and has not created in the German people the 
state of mind that makes for international peace. And the 
sentence passed by the world was really passed by those who 
were the convinced opponents of Germany. As to the sole 
guilt of the latter country, this verdict has been modified by 
numerous revelations that have since appeared. 


184 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


educated up to it, however long the process 
of education may take, will triumph over 
the antisocial tendencies that rage between 
nations at present, and that will serve as the 
lasting basis of a society of mankind. Is the 
League of Nations founded on such a prin- 
cipler 

The principle on which the League is 
founded is respect for the equal rights of 
strong and weak nations. ‘This is the ideal- 
istic element in it which fascinated men 
when the plan of the League was first an- 
nounced. And when the covenant of the 
League failed to answer the expectations 
that had been raised, disappointment was 
proportionately severe, and the expression 
was often heard that idealism had gone down 
to defeat. This pessimistic inference, how- 
ever, is not warranted. For, aside from the 
practical obstacles that always stand in the 
way of the immediate realization of an ideal, 
it must be acknowledged that the ideal it- 
self, as presented, and still urged, is imper- 
fect in a vital particular. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 185 


The equal rights of weak and strong na- 
tions are affirmed on ethical grounds. To 
this we assent. But when we press the in- 
escapable question—equal right to what? 
the answer is by no means satisfactory. 
Equal right, we are informed, to self-deter- 
mination; a right which, unless promptly 
qualified, proves mischievous, bringing in- 
ternational anarchy in its train. But quali- 
fied how, on what grounds? ‘To this in the 
ideal of the League there is no answer. 
Again, what is the object for the sake of 
which self-determination is to be accorded 
to each nation? Answer, in order that it may 
work out its happiness, its prosperity, unhin- 
dered by its neighbors. But this is an appeal 
to enlightened self-interest, and is by no 
means an ethical appeal. And, moreover, has 
it not been demonstrated many times over 
that it is not in the nature of self-interest to 
be enlightened; that self-interest when inter- 
preted to mean the satisfaction of the desires 
of the self, always grasps at immediate satis- 
factions as soon as the opportunity of obtain- 


186 SPIRITUAL STD Hak: 


ing them is sufficiently tempting? It may be 
said that in the long run it is really to the 
interest of the strong to refrain from aggres- 
sion against the weak. But when have the 
strong ever been deterred from violence 
against the weak by the consideration of 
what is best in the long run? It might have 
been better for the world, it assuredly would 
have been, if there had not been the scramble 
for the spoils of Africa; it might have been 
better for Russia to have resisted the temp- 
tation to seize Port Arthur, and for Germany 
to have refrained from seizing Kiau Chiau, 
etc.; it might have been better for Italy not 
to have laid hands on Tripoli—only to men- 
tion a few of the occurrences which have 
already been superseded by more recent acts 
of aggression, perpetrated, indeed, by mem- 
bers of the League themselves, since the 
League was formed. 

To tie the nations together in the bond of 
amity and unity by the tie of self-interest, is 
to tie them with a rope of sand, is to bind 
them with green withes, like those with 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 187 


which Samson was bound, flimsy fetters 
which the war giant will snap as soon as it 
occurs to him to rise up in his brutal 
strength.** 

The principle of equal rights for the weak 
and the strong is sacred. Even to enunciate 
it at all, however untenable the grounds on 
which it was put, may prove profitable to the 
human race. In so far our judgment of the 
League will be favorable.“ But another 


13 As the use of repressive force by the League is an appli- 
cation of an obsolete method of punishment, so the glittering 
ideal of the League is merely an application to the nations of 
the obsolete individualistic philosophy of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, which has been tried and been found wanting in the 
competitive, internal, economic relations. To encourage men, 
whether as individuals or as nations, to put forth their utmost 
efforts in an attempt selfishly to gain material happiness, and 
at the same time to require that they respect the equal selfish- 
ness of their fellows, is to ask them to follow contradictory 
motives. 


14 Critics of the League are often told that at least a begin- 
ning has been made. Let the covenant of the League be 
amended, but let us not sacrifice what we have gained. A 
statement of this kind needs to be carefully scrutinized. Is 
the beginning that has been made a good start? In what 
respect is it a good start, and in what respect is it a bad start? 
Fifty-one nations have combined to keep the peace among 
themselves. The mere setting up of this object is a good 
beginning, but the way by which it is proposed to accomplish 
the object is bad—in so far the beginning that has been made 
is bad. The way along which it is proposed to reach the goal 
may prove to be not a highway, but a byway, which threatens 
to end in a bog. It may be, therefore, necessary to retrace 
one’s steps in order to make a better start. It may be neces- 
sary not merely to amend the covenant of the League, but to 


188 SPIRITUALVI DEAL 


and a sounder foundation must be found— 
not peace for the sake of prosperity, not an 
equal right to the vague thing called national 
happiness, can we, at least from the spiritual 
point of view, approve, but rather an equal 
right for each people to contribute its best 
toward the fulfillment of the task of man- 
kind, an equal right to perfect that type of 
civilization for which it stands, with the view 
of perfecting the greater and nobler civiliza- 
tion of the future. An intrinsic bond only, 
can finally unite the peoples of the earth. 
And that intrinsic bond is not self-interest, 
but (if the expression be allowed) interna- 
tional love, the love that acknowledges that 
the best in the life of other peoples is an es- 


renounce the policy of repression by the force which it embodies. 
In the sixteenth century the seamen of many countries were ob- 
stinately determined to find a Northwest Passage to the Indies. 
They tapped the American continent at various points. It is 
pathetic, for instance, to think of Hendrick Hudson sailing up the 
river which bears his name in the expectation of reaching the 
ocean beyond, unaware of the three thousand miles of land 
that interposed between the headwaters of the river and the 
Pacific. At last they gave up the fruitless search for a North- 
west Passage. Magellan rounded the southern cape, and in 
our day the great continental wall was pierced at Panama. 
The League is at least a good beginning so far as its osten- 
sible purpose is concerned, but as to the way by which it 
seeks to accomplish its purpose it is a bad beginning. 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND 189 


sential element in a people’s own best life, 
and that a nation produces the best in itself 
by endeavoring to bring the deposit of the 
best in others to light.” 

The guiding thoughts which have been 
followed in this exposition are: 

1. The spiritual rule as enunciated is ap- 
plicable alike in the family, in the vocation, 
in the state, in international relations. 

2. Whatever constitution for an interna- 


15 How far we are from any such conception of the relation 
of people to people is evident in the discussions that have 
taken place as to the vanquished people of Germany. The 
English Prime Minister, at one time, compared the German 
people to an animal whose back had been broken, writhing on 
the ground in convulsive agony, and therefore harmless. The 
dismemberment, the complete ruin of Germany, has been con- 
templated by some. And the most humane point of view that has 
since been reached is that the debtor nation should be suffi- 
ciently restored to economic efficiency to meet its obligations to 
the victors, and to buy and sell under proper restrictions in 
the world market. That Germany, with all its errors and 
crimes (should not one rather say the crimes of its rulers?) 
has been a spiritual asset of the human race; that out of the 
mind and heart of this people, as out of a deep fountain, have 
come vast contributions to science and to the arts; that together 
with the Greeks and the Hindus, the Germans have been one 
of the chief philosophic peoples of the world, the originators 
of great philosophical systems, that they have advanced the 
science and art of education—all this seems to have been for- 
gotten. The one matter present to the minds of their neigh- 
bor nations is: Can they be made to pay, to buy? And the 
other question: Should the fountain that has flowed so gen- 
erously in the past be choked up, or should it be helped to give 
forth life more purely? is scarcely asked. International love, 
if it existed, would teach a different attitude. 


190 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


tional society may be proposed is to be tested 
and judged by the ennobling retroactive ef- 
fect it is likely to have on the member na- 
tions themselves. 

3. In order to overcome the clash of in- 
terests and purposes, there must be an over- 
arching end, an end so commanding and 
august that the private interests are seen 
to be best achieved when they strip them- 
selves of their privacy and coincide with that 
ulterior, grander end. In the case of the 
clash of nation with nation, the overarching 
end is the spiritual ideal of civilization as 
defined. 

4. For practical next steps toward the for- 
mation of a society of mankind, the three 
thoughts are: concentration on one urgent 
issue at a time with a view of gradually 
creating an enlightened world public opin- 
ion; confrontation in the case of controver- 
sies with the view of overcoming ex parte 
propaganda and bringing out the right on 
either side, and finally co-relation instead of 
mere coordination, with the view of help- 


SOCIETY OF MANKIND | 1o1 


ing on the organisation of the corpus spiri- 
tuale, the civilization in which the soul of 
humanity will have its body. 

Concentration, Confrontation, Co-rela- 
Erol Ay 





16 In presenting the ideal of a perfect civilization as the aim 
of mankind, I have not in view an ethical millennium. It is 
the creative energy expended in rising to ever higher levels of 
achievement, and never the actual accomplishment itself, in 
which human nature must find its satisfaction. 


VI 
ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 


HAT does it all mean? and, What 

do I mean in the scheme of things? 
are the two questions. And the answer im- 
plied in the foregoing lectures is: I must 
find out what I mean, and then I shall 
know what the world means. The key of 
the secret is in my own bosom. Philoso- 
phers have in vain tried the opposite pro- 
cedure, constructing a metaphysical picture 
of the world, and then finding a place for 
man in it. I find a way out of my own 
perplexities by starting with, by trying 
the ethical approach, by searching for a 
point where the infinite appears in human 
nature itself, that is, in ethical experience, 
and from that point building up the eternal 


world, enveloping my spiritual nature with 
192 


Dw EUDEVTOWARD VEIR ES? 193 


the infinite company of spiritual beings re- 
lated to it. 

The decisive turn is taken in the equa- 
tions: ethical quality equals worth; worth 
equals indispensableness; indispensable- 
ness equals membership in an ideal infinite 
organism, a corpus spirituale. The essential 
spiritual nature of man is not atomistic, but 
social, or rather, suprasocial. In his inmost 
self man is related to other selves, in such 
fashion that he lives in them and they in 
him. 

What, then, is it that makes life worth 
while? ‘What the prize for which the race 
is to be run? What my sovereign end? 
‘What the object which above all others it 
imports that I seek to attain? It is the con- 
viction, through the experience of the spiri- 
tual nature in myself, that the ultimate re- 
ality in things is spiritual, that there is an 
eternal order in which I, in the ultimate 
truth of my being, am inseparably included; 
that the world is not a madhouse, though 
with its cruelties it often seems such; that a 


194, SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


human being is not a mere wave of the flux, 
though the days of his life be but threescore 
years and ten, and full of sorrow and trouble. 
In a word, the prize for which the arduous 
race is to be run by me is the conviction that 
I have a soul—to use for a moment the 
familiar word, despite its uncanny connota- 
tions. The conviction that man has a soul 
is not a gratuitous boon, a gift bestowed 
on him by fairy hands at his cradle; it is 
not to be believed on hearsay or on the 
authority of some revelation; it is a prize 
to be won by hard, assiduous effort contin- 
ued through a lifetime, and becoming surer 
for those who do not relax the effort as they 
approach the end. 

Self-knowledge then in the sense of knowl- 
edge that penetrates down to the essence of 
the self, is the supreme aim. But self-knowl- 
edge, be it distinctly noted, for the sake of the 
illumination it casts on the world, the cosmic 
inferences it permits and necessitates; self- 
knowledge, whereby to overcome the sense 
of alienness that so deeply troubles us as 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 105 


subsisting between the world and ourselves; 
self-knowledge as a means of making our 
peace with the universe, of making it a home. 

Now, in order to know oneself as a spirit- 
ual being, it is necessary to see others as 
spiritual beings. The conditio sine qua non 
for one who seeks to learn the spiritual atti- 
tude toward life is to acquire the power of 
second-sight, the clairvoyance that will en- 
able him to see his fellow human beings, 
despite their repulsive traits, their often 
hideous imperfections, as potential spiritual 
companions. For to know the self is to know 
it in its relations, is to know it as exercising a 
distinctive kind of energy on others.” 

How, then, shall one acquire this ex- 
cellent art of clairvoyance, of spiritual sec- 
ond-sight; how shake oneself free of the in- 





1To speak of self-knowledge in any other sense would be 
misleading. The self as it exists in the eternal order is incog- 
nisable, and unimaginable. What we predicate of it is distinctive- 
ness, and the relation of joint action and reaction, of energy 
projected and energetic impact received, that subsists between 
it and an infinity of other spiritual beings, It is by thus defin- 
ing it in terms of the ideal organism that we have taken the 
third step in definition, in advance of the vague holiness defini- 
tion of the Hebrews and the atomistic conception of Chris- 
tianity. (Cf. chapter 2.) The word spiritual means for us 
simply ideally organic. 


106 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


sistent impressions made on the mind by 
the actual behavior of others, by that out- 
side nature of theirs, if indeed it be the mere 
outside, which in any case is so hard to pene- 
trate? Starting from the legitimate pre- 
supposition that the constitution of the mind 
is fundamentally the same in all men, that 
certain fundamental experiences of mine are 
capable of being experienced by others,’ I be- 
gin by attributing to my fellowmen the same 
distinction between body and mind which I 
am aware of in myself. Here the Stoic 
teaching can be of use. Following Epic- 
tetus we can say: If there is a pain in thy 
limb, remember that the pain is in thy limb 
and not in thee; if in leprosy or some other 
horrible disease the body become a mass of 
festering sores; if in the last stages of ill- 
ness the physical part of thee is about to 
crumble into dust, remember that this putrid 
thing is not thou; that the little heap of 
dust which presently is all that will remain 





2It will presently be seen that this does not conflict with 
the unlikeness which has been emphasized throughout these 
lectures. 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 197 


of the physical part of thee is after all 
not the whole thing, not the essential thing, 
not thou. But if this is true of thee, it 
is true also of thy fellow. Apply to him 
the same discrimination between that which 
is not his real self and that which is. Even 
though at the outset you know nothing of 
the latter, in any case there 1s something 
thateis not the bodily parti” That isa fair 
starting point. 

I proceed next, helped in my search for 
selfhood by the Hebrew-Christian teaching, 
to distinguish between that which is mor- 
ally evil in me, that which yields to the per- 
suasion of the grosser appetites, of the anti- 
social passions and the like, and that other 
thing in me which is competent to resist 
those impulsions and solicitations. Perhaps 
I find that my own deflections from the stand- 
ard of what I conceive to be right are not as 
crass as those of some others. I am neither 
a criminal nor sodden in drink, and yet in 
my own eyes I am not a whit less culpable, 
possibly more so, than those whose heredity 


198 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


was darker, whose advantages were less. 
Nevertheless, I know that whatever errors 
I may have committed, there is in me an in- 
exhaustible potency of regeneration. There 
never is a moment when I can not turn 
over a new leaf, when I can not gain 
from past experience the purchase for a new 
upward start. This capital experience also 
I transfer to others. Even though they 
often have the semblance of ravening beasts 
I must see them as capable of a moral 
metempsychosis here and now. ‘The issue 
between those who are spiritually minded 
and those who are secular minded is put 
sharply in the expression ‘“‘a hopeless case,” 
as I have seen it frequently used, for in- 
stance, in the discussion of marriage, it being 
argued that marriage should be dissolved 
when the case is hopeless. To the spiritu- 
ally minded no human being is a mere case, 
and no human being is hopeless—that is the 
decisive point of difference. Jesus, in consort- 
ing with publicans and harlots, acted upon 
this divine presupposition. He taught faith 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 199 


and taught it effectually because he had it. 
We are trying to see others spiritually; how 
far have we proceeded? [I look at a man and 
I say to myself: he is not all body; there is 
something else in him not physical. I look 
at one who is living in evil ways, and I say 
he is not sentenced to go on living so wretch- 
edly. There is a power of rejuvenation in 
him if only it can be reached. 

But is it not possible to form a more defi- 
nite image of the spiritual being in order to 
counteract the overwhelming impression 
produced by the outside of men’s lives? 
The ideally organic conception comes to our 
aid. ‘The spiritual self is apprehended in its 
energizing. The energizing of a man is par- 
ticularly conspicuous in his vocation. I can 
form a definite spiritual image of another 
when I picture him exercising his vocation 
according to the spiritual rule. For instance, 
when I think of a man engaged in business or 
in industry, I can think of him spiritually as 
dropping the motive of pecuniary gain and 
substituting for it the service motive, as ex- 


200 SPIRERU ARVADA 


plained in chapter four. I can picture a 
lawyer spiritually when I think of him as 
exercising his function as a teacher of jus- 
tice, a mediator and promoter of progressive 
justice. I can picture a woman spiritually 
when I think of her as exercising in marriage 
and the family that solar influence which I 
have described in the third chapter. And 
so in all relations, in citizenship, in the 
relation of the individual through his own 
nation to other nations. In friendship also 
the spiritual image is that of the man as 
he envisages this relation from the point of 
view of the spiritual rule, as he tries to super- 
induce upon the bare facts of his relation 
that spiritual significance which they are 
capable of engendering. Such spiritual im- 
ages of friends and spouses, and fellow 
citizens of my people and of mankind I am to 
form as I pass through life. I am to be the 
creator of these spiritual images. And, hav- 
ing these images in mind, so far as I am 
connected with others, I am to see them in 
the light of this their possible perfection, and 


ATTITUDE FOWARD LIFE § 2o1 
by seeing them and by changing myself, in- 
duce them to approximate to their possible 
perfection. 

Every man and woman should thus be a 
spiritual artist, portrait painter, the portraits 
painted having this virtue in them that they 
are not only like the spiritual original, but 
that the original, beholding them, is stirred 
to a great love for this his sublime counter- 
part, and is moved in some measure to con- 
form to it. 

It will be admitted, I imagine, that the 
ideal as thus presented is no longer in the air, 
that it has “hands and feet,” that it is capable 
of coming home to men’s business and bo- 
soms, of taking hold of a disorganized world 
and offering it a principle of organisation, 
and that it thus becomes possible to pursue 
jointly the task of external betterment and 
the improvement of human nature itself. 
But how far can we succeed in the prosecu- 
tion of this task? Can we at all expect, under 
finite conditions, to reach the goal of ethical 
perfection? Is there to be an ethical millen- 


202 SPIRITUAL IDEAL 


nium? And if not, if we are striving to at- 
tain that which finitely is unattainable, what 
profit is there in striving? What after all is 
the worth while outcome of our endeavors? 
The mystics speak of a dark ground in 
God. The material in nature and in human 
nature on which we operate is in an ulti- 
mate sense intractable to the spiritual pat- 
tern which we seek to impose upon it, not 
wholly intractable indeed, for in the course 
of ages the propensities inherited by us 
from the inferior creatures have been in 
part subdued and modified, and there is hope 
of a progressus to which no bounds can be 
set, in an upward direction. Nevertheless, in 
an ultimate sense human nature as we know 
it, and the ideal of perfection toward which 
the mind stretches, can never coalesce. 
Again, man, on the natural side of him, is 
a part of the time and space world; and since 
time and space though illimitable are not 
infinite, the time and space world itself can 
never be rounded into a systematic whole, 
can never present that completeness which 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 203 


perfection, by the very notion of it, requires. 
We stand here veritably before an abyss, the 
abyss that separates the imperfect from the 
perfect, the finite from the infinite, we face 
the final question that every world view, 
every Weltanschauung, must somehow reck- 
on with: How, if perfection exists, say in 
the eternal world, is it possible that imper- 
fection should exist alongside of it? There 
have been many attempts to bridge this gulf 
by means of so-called theodicies, which are 
intended to explain and justify the coexist- 
ence. It cannot be justified. Explanation is 
impossible. To explain is to assign a cause; 
and causality, or the rule that every antece- 
dent is followed by its appropriate conse- 
quent applies within the sequence of phe- 
nomena, but does not apply to the relation 
between phenomena and that which is not 
phenomenon, the infinite or eternal. Every 
theodicy has broken down. Every one of 
them, when closely scrutinized, is seen to 
contain a fallacy of some kind, and to embar- 
rass the moral sense as well. The Creation 


204 SPIREDUAIS aA 


hypothesis is the most outstanding example: 
“And God saw everything that He had made, 
and behold it was very good.” ‘The words 
“He made” are intended to designate a par- 
ticular kind of causality, and are liable 
to the objection just stated, while the opti- 
mism conveyed in the phrase “very good,” is 
either so blind or so transcendental that the 
average moral consciousness is unable to 
deal with it. 

The great philosopher of harmonization, 
Leibnitz, comes to the assistance of theology 
by arguing that even if this world is in many 
ways defective, it is yet the best of all worlds 
of which the existence was possible. The 
mathematics of this argument may illus- 
trate the genius of Leibnitz, but the conclu- 
sion reached will be cold comfort to those 
who are crushed by the physical and moral 
evils of this best possible world. And, be- 
sides, there is implied a discouraging reflec- 
tion upon the power of the Deity. If this 
was the best possible world, might it not 
have been better that He should have ab- 


ECU DE SDOWARDE LTR Hoc 


stained from creating and remained quies- 
cent in his eternal sanctuary? 

The difficulty remains, no matter what the | 
hypothesis. If it be pantheistic, then how 
can the finite emanate from the infinite; if 
it be Hegelian absolutism, how can the per- 
fect lapse into the imperfect? How account 
for the initial lapse? If St. Augustine tells 
us that the world is to be compared to a pic- 
ture, and the evils therein to the shadows that 
serve to bring the lights into relief, we shall 
summon to witness against him some 
mother of a dying child, and ask her whether 
she is satisfied with the explanation that the 
suffering and death of her beautiful child 
is a means of bringing into relief the life 
and happiness of other people’s children. 
Besides, is it true that the lights in the 
picture predominate over the shadows? 
Does not our judgment as to that depend 
very largely upon temperament? And who 
is it after all that sees the whole picture? The 
Deity of the all-seeing eye. And can we im- 
agine that He, like a human beholder, should 


206 SPIRTTU ARSED E As 


need those dark shadows in order to en- 
hance His pleasure in the illuminated parts? 
Oh how fragile, how crumbling are the 
planks which are used to construct a bridge 
over the abyss that separates the imperfect 
from the perfect! 

Agnosticism, 1t seems, would be the way 
out, and it is for the secular minded; it can- 
not be for the spiritually minded. By the 
phrase secular minded, I intend no impu- 
tation. I mean by it those who are content 
to make themselves and others at home in 
the world as it is as far as possible, whose 
wisdom it is to clinch their teeth and to en- 
dure the inevitable whenever they and those 
they care most for, are hard hit, and who 
regard the ideal as at best a poetic illusion, on 
a par with creations of the poetic imagina- 
tion in general. But agnosticism of this 
kind, I say, cannot be the way out for the 
spiritually minded, that is, for those who 
regard the ideal of perfection as the mind’s 
representation of that which actually ex- 
ists. With this view, agnosticism in a cer- 


AD TICUDE TOWARD) LIBRE 207 


tain sense is indeed compatible. In the 
sense that we cannot know, if to know 
means to explain, to assign a cause. But if 
to know may also mean to be convinced and 
that on grounds of immediate experience of 
man’s worth and what that worth implies, if 
it means the consciousness that one lives in 
promoting the life of another, and recipro- 
cally in being awakened to true life by the 
effect on oneself of another’s life; if this ex- 
perience, this awareness of reciprocity, of 
being at once cause and effect, is a real 
experience, then we can rid ourselves of 
agnosticism as a final attitude. For then 
the spiritual rule, the rule that obtains within 
the ideal order, has been verified to us, by the 
operation of it in ourselves. 

And another thought of vital consequence 
needs here to be added. The experience re- 
ferred to is not one to be wished for or not 
as one pleases, as one may desire to become a 
great scientist or a great artist, or forego 


such ambitions if he prefers. Ethically, 


208 SPIRTI CATA IDEAL 


spiritually, every human being is called, and 
chosen to be great. For whatever the incon- 
ceivable relations between the perfect and 
the imperfect may be, this at least is borne 
in upon us,—that the infinite presses upon us 
to be expressed in our finite experience. 
Upon the human self there is this pressure 
from the transcendental world. The acqui- 
sition of a high ethical character is nat a 
matter of mere subjective choice, as one of- 
ten hears it said that he who remains mor- 
ally undeveloped is one who fails to be- 
come acquainted with the eternal values dur- 
ing his brief existence. He misses some- 
thing which he might have had if he had 
chosen; he goes without the finest insights 
which he might have achieved. He is a 
wave of the flux, but the light of the eternal 
sun might have shimmered on the crest of 
his little wave. All this is subjective, while 
the real ethical experience is that of an ob- 
jective task to be accomplished, of an ex- 
perience to be gained, not because it is merely 
delightful, since it is fraught with pain, but 


eee RUD RO OMIA aL hs 200 


to be gained nevertheless because as finite 
beings we are subject to the pressure of the 
eternal world. 

It is this that distinguishes the attitude 
toward life which I have expounded, even 
from those systems which rate the ethical 
values as values above all others, whilst still 
retaining them as values to be appreciated 
subjectively by the individuals to whom they 
appeal. 

But I must now return to the question 
raised above. If the perfect realization is 
‘impossible in the finite world, if we are 
bound for a goal which finitely we cannot 
reach, what is the worthwhileness of our 
life? What is the outcome of our experi- 
ence? The outcome is, intense conscious- 
ness of the pressure which it is spiritual 
death to resist. The outcome is the knowl- 
edge of that spiritual rule which it is possible 
for us, within limits, to apply successfully, 
when and in so far as we succeed in doing so, 
our relations to fellow human beings become 
irradiated. Marriage is glorified by the spir- 


210 SPIRITOAL I DEAE 


itual rule, friendship is; our work in the voca- 
tions ceases to be restricted to obvious ends, 
and acquires a great, yes cosmic significance. 
So does our citizenship, and the term “Civ- 
ilization” is lifted out of its connection with 
the civitas terrestris to become the earthly 
mirror of the civitas superna. ‘There is no 
lack of incentive to work cheerfully and 
courageously along spiritual lines in the 
finite world to which we belong. Every at- 
tempt to apply successfully the spiritual 
rule confirms our confidence in the rule, our 
consciousness of the existence of a spiritual 
part in us. And every failure in turn, every 
frustration of effort, only intensifies our will 
to renew the effort, only clears and exalts 
our conception of that majestic infinite which 
cannot be realized in the finite, because the 
finite breaks down under its weight. 

The ideal which I have enunciated has 
been accused of overemphasizing frustration, 
of leading to a depressing view of life. If 
to stand at the brink, as it were, of the finite, 
and to look out upon the solemn serenity of 


eee DD el OW AR Dist bh tir aT Tt 


the eternal order is depressing, then the ac- 
cusation is just. But frustation is only the 
stepping-stone. The accent of my view of 
life is on that which lies beyond the frus- 
tration—frustration being the inevitable 
Mic anseeto miner rnoiestuvisiona | Andeutor 
success, too, I repeat, a place is found in 
this ideal, since it is only by a vigorous at- 
tack upon the actual, finite relations, with 
a view to organising them, that the self- 
knowledge of which I have spoken all along 
can be achieved.* 

In the first chapter, entitled “De Profun- 
dis,” it was laid down that every great ideal 
is born of pain and corresponds to certain 
urgent objective needs. ‘Three needs of 
our time and generation were mentioned, 
and three problems arising out of these 
needs: the problem of the insignificance of 
man in the face of the innumerable worlds, 
the problem of the man who perishes in the 





3 How the evils with which human life is afflicted, how 
sickness, guilt and bereavement can be utilized in the inter- 
ests of spiritual self-knowledge, I have indicated in the third 
part of my Ethical Philosophy. 


212 SPIRE EW Ade eae 


meanwhile, and the problem of the divided 
conscience. 

Nothing has been effectually said in these 
chapters if the answer to the first prob- 
lem is not now evident. The sense of man’s 
utter nothingness is relieved, the heavy pall 
of the consciousness of insignificance is 
lifted by self-knowledge—man’s knowledge 
of himself as a spiritual being. Gazing at 
night upon the star-sown firmament he is 
not dwarfed into littleness. Stars and suns 
are lesser lights compared with those supra- 
solar luminaries that constitute the spir- 
itual universe. And the magnitudes of space 
and time, far from overwhelming him, 
are useful as supports to lean on in rising to 
the conception of the transcendent magni- 
tude of the infinite host of spirits whereof 
man is one—an infinitesimal one (hence his 
humility), an indispensable one (hence his 
dignity). 

The solution of the second problem con- 
cerning the fate of the man who perishes in 
the meantime is that spiritually he need not 


ATTITUDE TOWARD LIFE 213 


perish in the meantime; he has worth and he 
can affirm it under no matter what material 
conditions. His worth demands, indeed, that 
the conditions under which he lives be inces- 
santly improved, but he is not the helpless 
victim of his conditions for all that. He can 
exercise the spiritual rule of promoting the 
best in others, his wife and children, for in- 
stance, thereby honoring the best in him- 
self, in the meanest hovel of the slums.* 
The problem of the divided conscience—the 
moral law recognized in the private relations 
and the law of strife prevailing in business 
and politics—ceases to exist under the spir- 
itual ideal as stated. There are no longer 
two laws, the conscience is no longer dis- 
tracted by opposite tendencies. There is 
one law, that runs through all the human re- 
lations, the family, the vocation, the state, 
etc. ‘These are successive stages on the road 
toward the supreme goal. One and the same 


4 That the statement in the text is not overstrained is dem- 
onstrated by the examples of moral grandeur which are often 
encountered among the poorest by those who are familiar with 
their lives. 


214 SPERIT UAT UD Als 


rule obtains in all, only blossoming into 
richer meanings as man passes out of the 
nearer into the more remote—out of the nar- 
rower into the wider groups.°* 

Spinoza has truly said that wisdom con- 
sists not in the contemplation of death but 
in the contemplation of life. Nevertheless it 
is well at times in imagination to think of 
oneself as facing death, in order then to 


5A distinction, it is true, must be recognized between the 
nearer groups within which man is relatively independent in 
the exercise of influence, less dependent on the cooperation 
of others, and those wider groups in which, in order to effect 
apparent changes, he is dependent on the codperation of many, 
nay of multitudes. The present competitive system, for in- 
stance, cannot be abolished by any single employer or small 
group of employers, however well-intentioned they may be; 
our bad politics cannot be redeemed by a single or a few 
high-minded citizens; and still less can the international situa- 
tion be changed even by an idealistic statesman. There are 
clearly limits to the application of the spiritual rule by any 
man throughout all the relations in which he stands. He is a 
man of affairs, and he cannot of his own motion change the 
business habits of the world; he is a citizen, but he cannot 
extemporize the noble state; he is a member of mankind, but 
he cannot, through his own unaided efforts, establish the world 
society. But two considerations are pertinent: he can do 
something in each of these relations to give an impetus in 
the right direction, and it is the direction that counts so far 
as he is concerned ; and he can, in those groups where he is 
relatively competent, apply the potent strength of that spiritual 
rule which is the yeast that is competent to leaven the whole 
lump—he can kindle a fire that by and by will spread its living 
ardor throughout mankind. He can even contribute toward 
national peace and justice by extirpating from his own heart 
the racial antipathies, the hatreds, the cupidities, that are the 
ultimate causes of the vast world discord. 


AEE CODE TOWARD YLIRE ars 


turn back and form a juster estimate of the 
aims and ends of life that really count. It 
is not too much to say that most men live 
provisional lives, absorbed in the pursuit of 
merely provisional ends,° such as to build up 
a business, or to carry through a scheme of 
reform, or to see their children happily mar- 
ried or successful in some profession; and 
they forget that these same children, now 
young perhaps, will presently stand where 
they stand—at the brink—the few decades 
allotted to human beings passing for them 
also with incredible swiftness. The activi- 
ties and the provisional ends seem futile 
enough unless they are linked to some 
ulterior ultimate end. 

Standing then at the terminus, I should 
say that one guiding thought for me would 
be continued interest in the progress of the 
human race to which I belong. A youth 
thinks of his mature age as the continuation 


6 Not because they fear to die (Lucretius’s admonitions in 
this regard would be superfluous for most modern men), but 
because of their intense bent toward activity, on which account 
they are averse to thinking of the moment when their activity 
must cease. 


216 SPER EE OAR so ele 


of his present life, so I think of future 
generations as continuing my earthly life, 
and as I desire progress for myself, so I 
desire it for mankind. Progress means ad- 
vance toward a society which shall more 
adequately reflect in all its relations the pat- 
tern of the spiritual world. To see God as re- 
flected in the face of Christ 1s the theological 
way of putting this idea; to see the world of 
spiritual perfection as reflected in the face 
of humanity is the turn I give to the same 
thought.’ 

And the second crucial thought that 
touches me is that of the persistence of 
the spiritual part. Do we live merely in the 





7 That there actually is progress in human history it is im- 
possible to prove. I rest my belief in progress, not on the 
fact that it is demonstrable, for it is not demonstrable, but on 
the moral pronouncement that it ought to be, that therefore 
it can be, and must be. 

I may add that the idea of living in the life of future 
generations is one thing, that of living in the memory of 
future generations is quite another thing. The latter has 
never appealed to me. Some of the greatest benefactors of the 
race in the past have been forgotten—not even their names have 
come down to us: Those that are remembered are few in num- 
ber, and their memory is often disfigured, and their teachings, 
as in the case of Jesus, distorted. Not to be quite forgotten by 
those whom we have loved and who love us is a pleasing thought, 
but they who remember us will in turn soon pass from the 
scene, and our so-called earthly immortality will die with them. 
How ironically touching are the inscriptions on tombstones! 


ob eb DUDE LOW ARD Lib haar 


effect we leave behind upon the life of future 
generations on this earth? Is the spiritual 
part of us obliterated? The doctrine of im- 
mortality as commonly understood means 
that the psychophysical organism will con- 
tinue to exist in some attenuated fashion in 
another sphere. The departed will be recog- 
nisable, their arms will be outstretched to 
welcome us, and the like. Or again, the 
psychic is supposed to be clothed with, to 
assume (a vague form of speech to which 
no definable meaning whatever can be 
attached) new organs unlike the bodily. 
These evidently are projections of tem- 
poral conditions into the admittedly non- 
temporal; the last outreachings of human 
tenderness striving to keep hold of the 
beloved as a concrete object. 

With the doctrine in this version of it I 
am not concerned. What is required of me 
is the valiancy of truth. I must train my- 
self to relinquish tranquilly and in toto 
the psychophysical self. What I retain 
is the conviction that the spiritual self is 


218 DPIKRILPUALC GID EAT 


the eternal self and cannot perish. And 
secondly, that this spiritual self of mine, 
being social or suprasocial, is inseparably 
bound up with other spiritual selves, and 
in this sense that those I have loved and I, 
cannot be parted in eternity. And if I seek 
communion with them while I still live here, 
I must produce the best in myself in order 
to encounter the best in them which is their 
very being. 


8 The weak spot in the usual arguments for immortality is 
that the soul or the spiritual part is taken atomistically, not 
socially. As an individual, or atomic entity, being only an 
imperfect copy of the individual God, there is no reason why it 
should continue to exist. Even if it did, since it 1s not linked 
up by any necessity with the infinite Deity, it might, for all 
we know, be set adrift amid the immensities, wandering, as 
Seneca fancies, among the stars. The doctrine of immor- 
tality as thus taught has in consequence dwindled into a mere 
hope. But the most ardent hope may be disappointed; for hope 
is a favorable view of what may be but is not certain to be, 
and is ever attended by its obverse fear. 

The social, or suprasocial character of the spiritual part 
of man, offers a new approach to the problem. 


(1) 
THE END 


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